In the last thirty years of the fifteenth century ten thousand editions of books and pamphlets are said to have been published throughout Europe, the most important half of them of course in Italy.

All the Latin authors were accessible to every student before the century closed.

Almost all the more valuable authors of Greece were published in the twenty years that followed.

The profound influence of this burst of the two great classic literatures on the world at once made itself felt.

"For the first time," to use the picturesque phrase of M.Taine, "men opened their eyes and saw." The human mind seemed to gather new energies at the sight of the vast field which opened before it.