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, because we cannot quite place ourselves within the mental horizon of the middle ages. We know, in a general way, what was the intellectual background of the Renaissance; the dominance of the scholastic philosophy in the thirteenth century; the prominent position held by the studies of Law and Medicine; the comparative poverty and inefficiency of the higher literary studies; for, though portions of the best Latin classics continued to be read throughout the middle ages, they were read, as a rule, in a spirit remote from the classical, or even contrary to it; and the West had lost Greek altogether. But such facts do not help us far towards entering into the heart of the early Renaissance. Perhaps there are two men who, more than any others, assist the effort to do so; Dante, standing in the borderland between the darker ages and the revival, when he shows us a keen intellect and a sublime imagination moving within the limits, and obedient to the forms, of medieval thought; and, at the further verge of the Renaissance, Erasmus, the lifelong antagonist of the schoolmen, who makes so vivid to us the contrast between the intellectual atmosphere of scholasticism and that which the humane letters had created.

Petrarch opens an era, because he was the first man in medieval Europe, not perhaps who possessed, but who was able effectively and impressively to manifest, a strong native affinity with the genius of the classical Latin writers; the first who succeeded in making large numbers of people feel that he had