Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/17

 Constantin Cantacuzino the Stolnic. This authentic scion of the old Greek imperial house was educated first in Adrianople and Constantinople and later in Venice, where other Roumanians too often came, not only for trade, but also, like Pepano, for cultural purposes. He went to the University of Padua, where medicine was taught in the manner of the Renaissance, viz: «philosophically » as a « iatrophilosophy ». The spirit of Allatius, Helladius, Cottonius regned there, and he profited by an education on western lines. Returning to his country (where he was the leading factor until his shocking death, at an extremely advanced age, when he was, with his son, the reigning prince Stephen Cantacuzino, murdered by the Turks), he wore the large robes of the oriental, shaved his head like the Turks, and dined seated after the manner of his masters. But his spirit remained Venetian; he wrote Italian as if it were his own language and was pleased to meet in Bucharest representatives of all western races, including the English doctor Chishull, who praises him in his descriptions of an eastern journey. The Italian periods, not the simple phrases of Rennaissance-Latin, distinguish a rare work, which was unfortunately never finished and has been preserved like the torso of an exquisite but unfinished statue, a work in which everything, the critical sense, the instinct for national integrity and not merely for scattered fragments, the disposition to polemics, which is western, is in the Italian manner.

In the neighbouring principality of Moldavia, the Occident first penetrated through Poland and by means of the Latin of the Renaissance. The first exponent was Gregory Ureche, the initiator, about the middle of the seventeenth century, of a critical historiography dominated by the sense of Roman origins. The work is worthy of the highest praise. Its phrasing has a Roman discipline; few