Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/66

 48 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. the reading of the classics ; but there was great diver- sity of individual taste and opinion and practice. The general statement may be made that, as century after century men grew in humanity, there came a deeper literary appreciation of the classics, forming a transi- tion to the poetic and literary reverence in which they were to be held by Boccaccio and Petrarch. Men use what they have need of and appreciate what is nearest to their temper and intellectual level. The works of the Latin commentators and gramma- rians — Servius, Donatus, Macrobius, Priscianus — were needed when they were written, as well as after- wards, in order to preserve some knowledge of the structure of the Latin language. They were funda- mental in the studies prosecuted in the schools of mediaeval education.^ Besides these grammarians, there were other men of the transition centuries who wrote compendia of the seven liberal arts, and still others who summarized pagan ethics or philosophy. Such transition works remained widely popular ; some of them became standard text-books in the schools; and through them the men of the Middle Ages re- ceived their profane education and the larger part of their classical knowledge. They were true works of the transition period, gathering and selecting from the classic past, recasting and presenting the antique substance in forms suited to the tastes and capacities of their own and the following centuries. We may 1 See as to these works, which were mainly based on Virgil, Comparetti, op. cit., Chap. V ; Teuffel-Schwabe, Geschichte der Rom. Lit., II, §§ 409, 431, 444, 481. How much Priscianus (sixth century) was used may be inferred from the fact that there are extant nearly a thousand manuscripts of his grammar, Teuffel, op. cit., II, § 481.