ters the common property of all. In the
last thirty years of the fifteenth century ten thousand editions of books
and pamphlets are said to have been published throughout Europe, the most
important half of them of course in Italy. All the Latin authors were
accessible to every student before the century closed. Almost all the more
valuable authors of Greece were published in the twenty years that
followed. The profound influence of this burst of the two great classic
literatures on the world at once made itself felt. "For the first time,"
to use the picturesque phrase of M. Taine, "men opened their eyes and
saw." The human mind seemed to gather new energies at the sight of the
vast field which opened before it. It attacked every province of
knowledge, and in a few years it transformed all. Experimental science,
the science of philology, the science of politics, the critical
investigation of religious truth, all took their origin from this
Renascence--this "New Birth" of the world. Art, if it lost much in purity
and propriety, gained in scope and in the fearlessness of its love of
Nature. Literature, if crushed for the moment by the overpowering
attraction of the great models of Greece and Rome, revived with a grandeur
of form, a large spirit of humanity, such as it has never known since
their day. In England the influence of the new movement extended far
beyond the little group in which it had a few years before seemed
concentrated. The great churchmen became its patrons. Langton, Bishop of
Winchester, took delight in examining the young scholars of his episcopal
family every evening, and sent all the most promising of them to study
across the Alps. Learning found a yet warmer friend in the Archbishop of
Canterbury.

[Sidenote: Warham]

Immersed as Archbishop Warham was in the business of the state, he was no
mere politician. The eulogies which Erasmus lavished on him while he
lived, his praises of the Primate's learning, of his ability in business,
his pleasant humour, his modesty, his fidelity to friends, may pass for
what eulogies of living men are commonly worth. But it is difficult to
doubt the sincerity of the glowing picture which he drew of him when death
had destroyed all interest in mere adulation. The letters indeed which
passed between the great churchman and the wandering scholar, the quiet,
simple-hearted grace which amidst constant instances of munificence
preserved the perfect equality of literary fri