[History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) by John Richard Green]@TWC D-Link book
History of the English People, Volume III (of 8)

CHAPTER II
27/75

All the restless energy which Florence had so long thrown into the cause of liberty she flung, now that her liberty was reft from her, into the cause of letters.

The galleys of her merchants brought back manuscripts from the East as the most precious portion of their freight.

In the palaces of her nobles fragments of classic sculpture ranged themselves beneath the frescoes of Ghirlandajo.
The recovery of a treatise of Cicero's or a tract of Sallust's from the dust of a monastic library was welcomed by the group of statesmen and artists who gathered in the Rucellai gardens with a thrill of enthusiasm.
Foreign scholars soon flocked over the Alps to learn Greek, the key of the new knowledge, from the Florentine teachers.

Grocyn, a fellow of New College, was perhaps the first Englishman who studied under the Greek exile, Chalcondylas; and the Greek lectures which he delivered in Oxford on his return in 1491 mark the opening of a new period in our history.
Physical as well as literary activity awoke with the rediscovery of the teachers of Greece; and the continuous progress of English science may be dated from the day when Linacre, another Oxford student, returned from the lectures of the Florentine Politian to revive the older tradition of medicine by his translation of Galen.
[Sidenote: John Colet] But from the first it was manifest that the revival of letters would take a tone in England very different from the tone it had taken in Italy, a tone less literary, less largely human, but more moral, more religious, more practical in its bearings both upon society and politics.

The awakening of a rational Christianity, whether in England or in the Teutonic world at large, begins with the Italian studies of John Colet; and the vigour and earnestness of Colet were the best proof of the strength with which the new movement was to affect English religion.


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