Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/496

 486 Providence hJeeting of the of classical scholarship which springs only from great study and great love. His soul does not appear to have been riven by a con- sciousness of sin in this behalf. Sometimes he passes so gently from Christian to pagan ethics, as to lead one to suspect that he did not deeply feel the inconsistency between them. Or again he seems satisfied with the moral reasonings of paganism, and sets them forth without a qualm. For instance in a letter which he writes to King Henry consoling him upon the loss of his son in the White Ship there is a strain of reasoning which would much more naturally have come from the lips of Seneca than from an archbishop of the time of St. Bernard. But the antique in Hildebert's ethical consolations reflects a manner of reasoning rather than an emotional mood. The emotion, the love and yearning, of medieval religion was largely the gift of Christianity. Miss Louise R. Loomis of Cornell University followed with a paper on " The Greek Renaissance in Italy ". The conventional view has described that movement as the abrupt recovery at the close of the fourteenth century and the opening of the fifteenth of the long- forgotten stores of Hellenic literature, and the emancipation under its stimulating influence of the Italian intellect from the bondage of medieval ignorance and superstition. Against this view she urged the temporary revival of Greek by the schoolmen of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the superficiality of the knowledge of Greek actually acquired by the Italian humanists of the early fifteenth cen- tury, the conventional quality of their eulogies of Hellenic literature, the many evidences that the culture which deeply impressed them and elicited their real admiration was that of Rome and Alexandria, that their literary model was Cicero, their Platonism secondary and derivative. In a discussion of the last three of these papers Professors James H. Robinson of Columbia University and Paul Van Dyke of Prince- ton endeavored to bring them into unity by dealing with the Renais- sance as a movement continuing through several centuries, rather than comprised in any one century. Professor Robinson set forth this thesis in its more extreme form, Professor A'an Dyke in one more qualified, representing the fifteenth century more distinctly as the culmination of a long process. While these papers were being read, the Bibliographical Society of America was considering topics which were in large part his- torical or of interest to the writers of history. Dr. Reuben G. Thwaites of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin read portions of a valuable report on the bibliographical work of historical socie-