Page:Petrach, the first modern scholar and man of letters.djvu/27

Rh. We are not beaten from our old opinion by logic, we are not driven off our ground;—our ground itself changes with us." So the change from the characteristic culture of the Middle Ages to that of modern times took place through the quietly operating agency of Roman literature.

By the middle of the fourteenth century Western Europe, under the guidance of Italy, was already on its way to recover what had been so long neglected. There was by that time a considerable body of scholars in the modern sense of the word, whose admiration and enthusiasm for the works of the ancients were far too sincere to permit them longer to adhere to the then generally accepted views of man and the universe. The secular conceptions and predilections which fill the literature of Rome gradually displaced the theological speculations which had previously engrossed the educated class. The merely human suddenly asserted itself and absorbed the attention of the new generation—the so-called Humanists. They no longer pored over the Sentences of Peter Lombard, but eagerly turned to Cicero for all those arts that go to the making of a man of cultivation. The humanities became