473.] To accuse the Church solely and wholly for this decay of humanistic learning in Italy would be uncritical and unjust.

We must remember that after a period of feverish energy there comes a time of languor in all epochs of great intellectual excitement.

Nor was it to be expected that the enthusiasm of the fifteenth century for classical studies should have been prolonged into the second half of the sixteenth century.

But we are justified in blaming the ecclesiastical and civil authorities of the Counter-Reformation for their determined opposition to the new direction which that old enthusiasm for the classics was now manifesting.

They strove to force the stream of learning backward into scholastic and linguistic channels, when it was already plowing for itself a fresh course in the fields of philosophical and scientific discovery.