Aonio Paleario complained that a professor was no better than a donkey working in a mill; nothing remained for him but to dole out commonplaces, avoiding every point of contact between the authors he interpreted and the burning questions of modern life.
Muretus, who brought with him to Italy from France a ruined moral reputation with a fervid zeal for literature, who sold his soul to praise the Massacre of S.Bartholomew and purge by fulsome panegyrics of great public crimes the taint of heresy that clung around him, found his efforts to extend the course of studies in Rome thwarted.[138] He was forbidden to lecture on Plato, forbidden to touch jurisprudence, forbidden to consult a copy of Eunapius in the Vatican Library.

It cost him days and weeks of pleading to obtain permission to read Tacitus to his classes.

Greek, the literature of high thoughts, noble enthusiasms, and virile sciences, was viewed with suspicion.

As the monks of the middle ages had written on the margins of their MSS.: _Graeca sunt, ergo non legenda_, so these new obscurantists exclaimed: _Graeca sunt, periculosa sunt, ergo non legenda_.

'I am forced,' he cries in this extremity, 'to occupy myself with Latin and to abstain entirely from Greek.' And yet he knew that 'if the men of our age advance one step further in their neglect of Greek, doom and destruction are impending over all sound arts and sciences.' 'It is my misery,' he groans, 'to behold the gradual extinction and total decay of Greek letters, in whose train I see the whole body of refined learning on the point of vanishing away.[139] A vigorous passage from one of Sarpi's letters directly bearing on these points may here be cited (vol.i.p.