Renaissance spirit. It is not the content of these works that gives him a place in the history of education, but this new conception of life and the new spirit and content of educa tion. This second great characteristic of Petrarch also has more than individual significance. As in its beginning, so throughout its course, the Renaissance in Italy remained dominantly personal and individual. Its spirit was that of the development and culture of the individual, and had little or no interest in the improvement of society in general. It did not seek to reform the morals of the time or to remove the formalism of the religious life or the narrowness of the political and institutional life.

Petrarch was an indefatigable student, and possessed the power as a scholar of stimulating others. Though he had many co-laborers and many successors, to him is directly due the revival of classical Latin.

Co-laborers of Petrarch. - Among the chief of these were Boccaccio (1313-1375), especially notable in literature, and Barzizza (1370-1431), especially notable for scholarship. These, with Petrarch, led in the movement for the recovery of the classical text, for the multiplication of these manuscripts, and for the founding of libraries. In one remaining aspect of the educational Renaissance-the recovery of the Greek language - Petrarch had little part. In the Hebrew the Italians had no interest, but to them was due the restoration of the Greek. Even among the Byzantine Greeks of the East a knowledge of the classical Greek was a rare thing; and while many travelers and some students had come in contact with the contemporary Greeks and a few of the Byzantians professed to teach Greek in Italy, the first real teacher of the classical Greek in the Western world for many centuries was Manuel Chrysoloras (d. 1415). From 1397 to 1400 Chrysoloras lectured at the University of Florence and later at other cities of Italy. Many flocked to his tuition; other Greek teachers followed his example; Greek manu

scripts were brought over in great numbers; Greek grammars were written for Latin students; and shortly there was given. to the Western world a new language and a whole literature, of infinitely greater wealth than that possessed, whether of classical Latin, of patristic and medieval Latin, or of the vernacular.

By the time the Renaissance movement had reached its zenith in Italy and had begun to pass north of the Alps, the classical Latin and Greek languages had been recovered; the largest part of the literature of these languages that we now possess had been brought to light, libraries had been founded, and the new spirit as well as the new knowledge had been firmly established.

MODIFIED CHARACTER OF THE RENAISSANCE IN NORTH EUROPE. The later Renaissance period, that of the latter half of the fifteenth century and the greater part of the sixteenth, was modified in two respects. By this time the movement had run its course in Italy and had begun to decline into a formalism little superior to the old; while, in the second place, the movement shifted north of the Alps and, though first welcomed by the French, received its greatest development among the Teutonic peoples. In the South the new learning tended to lose its wide interest in nature and in life, as well as the intensity of its belief in personal development, and to concentrate in the mere formal study of literature, until, on the educational side, it degenerated into that type later to be mentioned as "Ciceronianism." With the transfer to the North the change in spirit was even more significant; in one respect it was a narrowing, in another it was a broadening tendency. The early movement in the South was a most pronounced emphasis on individualism. The new learning was esteemed chiefly as a means of self-culture; through it individual opinion was to find freedom, individual appreciation to find means of expression, individual judgment to find scope

for exercise. The Italian Renaissance concentrated itself in the recovery of the literature of Greece and Rome as a means to these ends, since personality had never been so exalted as during the periods when these literatures were produced, or at least had nowhere else found such adequate expression. This the Northern nations did not get; among them the æsthetic element of the movement even as regards literature was comparatively undeveloped. There was not the broad interest in life, in its possibilities and in its opportunities for personal development; in its pleasures and its legitimate interests aside from the practical, that is, religious and social ones; little or none of that interest in the investigation of nature and of life in the past that so characterized the earlier period. Erasmus, who represents the later movement, as Petrarch did the earlier, had none of these. Since the archæological, aesthetic, philosophical interest of the early movement were for the most part expressions of self-culture, as well as means of personal development, there was comparatively slight attention to them.

While in the North the movement was a narrower one so far as it relates to personal development, it was infinitely broader in another respect, — in that it resulted in social reform and improvement. In the South the movement was aristocratic; in the North, until late in the sixteenth century, it was democratic. All of the early leaders were social or religious reformers, and with them the Renaissance movement fused with the Reformation movement. With Erasmus the interests that determined his career in life, the side of every controversy that he chose, and the selection of classics to be edited or translated were all determined by one aim. This was to remove the common ignorance, to root out the gross evils of Church and State, to condemn the selfishness, greed, and hypocrisy of all who used the cloak of their office, whether in government, in university, in monastery, or in Church, to prey upon the ignorance and superstition of those committed to their care.

As another example of this Teutonic tendency, take Jacob Wimpfeling, the great humanistic educator of Roman Catholic Germany. He asks, "Of what use are all the books in the world, the most learned writings, the most profound research, if they only minister to the vainglory of their authors, and do not, or cannot, advance the good of mankind? Such barren, useless, injurious learning as proceeds from pride and egotism serves to darken understanding and to foster all evil passions and inclinations; and if these govern the mind of an author, his works cannot possibly be good in their influence." All of Wimpheling's work was founded on the basal principle that "the better education of the young is the foundation of all true reform, ecclesiastical, national, and domestic." Thus it was with most of the humanists of North Europe. All such evils were based upon ignorance; hence the Renaissance in the North became more emphatically educational from this general social point of view, yet narrower so far as concerned the elements entering into the ideal of personal character. The broader interests of the earlier period had led to a freedom of opinion and to a license in action that was quite foreign to the character and piety of the German people. In the north action led to an emphasis on the moral and religious bearing of the new learning, and to a fusion with the Reformation cause. Whether necessary or not, the outcome certainly was a restriction of the educational ideal in scope, and a limiting of the function of individual judgment and of the right of personal development to religious rather than intellectual lines, and to the elimination for the vast majority of people of important elements of this ideal as formulated in the earlier period. This cannot be said to be true of all of the leaders of Erasmus, for example; but Erasmus was fighting all his life, not only against the abuses in Church and State based on ignorance and selfishness, but also against this narrowing tendency of the new learning, in literature, in education, in religion, in interest in nature, and in the bearing of learning on the broad,

practical aspects of life. The intellectual spirit, which was the essential feature of the Renaissance, prevailed largely during the first century of the movement in the North. But after the time of Erasmus most of this spirit of criticism of author ity, of toleration of personal opinion, of investigation and research into the ideas of the ancients and into the rationality of beliefs and practices, of interest in the processes of nature,all gave place to an intellectual formalism scarcely more tolerant than the medieval. By the time this formalism fully established itself, the Renaissance period as usually delimited was passed. But so far as schools were concerned, the old scholastic spirit had scarcely given way to the new before that was replaced by the new formalism, hardly more tolerant than the old. The great difference was that educational formalism was now founded on literary and linguistic instead of upon logical and dialectic studies.

THE EDUCATIONAL MEANING OF THE RENAISSANCE (a) The Revival of the Idea of the Liberal Education. - The devotion to the study of the classical literatures became not only the chief outward manifestation of the Renaissance spirit, but these literatures also furnished the chief means in developing the new life. The new aspirations for the development of free moral personality, defined on both the intellectual and the emotional sides as well, found little basis in the immediate past and little encouragement in the immediate present; but the life of the ancients as portrayed in their literature furnished both. The Renaissance was not a direct attempt to reëstablish the ideas and the life of the ancients, but in many respects it became an imitation, because the formulation of certain aspects of life by the ancients could not be improved upon, and some could not well be modified to conform to the needs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by those of so meager experience and outlook as had the men of that time. A most important