by his
direction, and naught remained in the Capitol but her empty marble
coffin. The tale, as told by Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in
Nantiporto with slight variations. One says that the girl's hair was
yellow, another that it was of the glossiest black. What foundation for
the legend may really have existed need not here be questioned. Let us
rather use the mythus as a parable of the ecstatic devotion which
prompted the men of that age to discover a form of unimaginable beauty
in the tomb of the classic world.[1]

[1] The most remarkable document regarding the body of Julia
which has yet been published is a Latin letter, written by
Bartholomaeus Fontius to his friend Franciscus Saxethus,
minutely describing her, with details which appear to prove
that he had not only seen but handled the corpse. It is printed
in Janitschek, _Die Gesellschaft der R. in It._: Stuttgart,
1879, p. 120.

Then came the third age of scholarship--the age of the critics,
philologers, and printers. What had been collected by Poggio and Aurispa
had now to be explained by Ficino, Poliziano, and Erasmus. They began
their task by digesting and arranging the contents of the libraries.
There were then no short cuts to learning, no comprehensive lexicons, no
dictionaries of antiquities, no carefully prepared thesauri of mythology
and history. Each student had to hold in his brain the whole mass of
classical erudition. The text and the canon of Homer, Plato, Aristotle,
and the tragedians had to be decided. Greek type had to be struck.
Florence, Venice, Basle, Lyons, and Paris groaned with printing presses.
The Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben toiled by night and day, employing
scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty brain, whose
work it was to ascertain the right reading of sentences, to accentuate,
to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place beyond the reach of
monkish hatred or of envious time that everlasting solace of humanity
which exists in the classics. All subsequent achievements in the field
of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labors of these men,
who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for the
accomplishment of their titanic task. Virgil was printed in 1470, Homer
in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1513. They then became the
inalienable heritage of mankind. But what vigils, what anxious
expenditure of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectat