Page:Petrach, the first modern scholar and man of letters.djvu/25

Rh of a new conception of life and its opportunities, for that accepted in the Middle Ages. When men began once more to read Virgil and Cicero, Horace and Juvenal, intelligently, sympathetically, admiringly, they had already left the Middle Ages behind them. The mediæval scholar placed his trust in dialectic. He was habitually careless of his premises so long as his logical deductions were unimpeachable. He made no effort, in short, to acquaint himself with the best that had been thought and said in the world. Though he might possess extraordinary intellectual keenness, or, like Vincent of Beauvais, the great encyclopædist of the thirteenth century, vast erudition, he was still hopelessly unformed and ill-balanced, for, as Matthew Arnold reminds us, "Far more mistakes come from want of fresh knowledge than from want of correct reasoning; and, therefore, letters meet a greater want in us than does logic." This is the secret of the Renaissance: it explains the immense significance of the revival of Latin learning.

Western Europe during the centuries following the Teutonic invasions had not only forgotten Greek literature, but it had lost its appreciation of most that was best in the