In

Of the spiritual and intellectual struggles toward light and freedom literature gives the fullest and most authentic account. Great writers have always been in advance of their time, and the impulse toward expression has come largely from the inspiration of escape from some bondage in which other men are held. From Socrates to Browning, the thinkers and poets have all been emancipators. the end this bringing of new light into the mind of the world will be counted their chief service. "When I am dead," said one of the keenest of modern minds, one of the greatest of modern poets, “lay a sword on my coffin, for I was a soldier in the war for the liberation of humanity." Like service has been rendered by almost all the great writers. They have seen beyond their time; they have parted company with some usage, some tradition out of which the life had ebbed; they have broken away from some decaying creed; they have put some new knowledge in the place of some old ignorance. The steady movement of great literature is toward the light; and there are few instrumentalities so potent to destroy provincialism, to dissipate popular misconceptions, and to substitute for parochial standards and ideas the larger thought of the larger world of open-minded men. Literature is the hereditary enemy of half-truths, of false perspectives in looking at life, of partial estimates in dealing with men. No man can open his mind to the spirit and teaching of the greatest minds

without suffering an enlargement of vision. A man can remain small in a library only by refusing the noble fellowship which lies within his reach; he cannot have companionship with inspiring persons and escape some share in their nobler vision of life.

CHAPTER XIV.

SOME OLD SCHOLARS.

THE study door is rarely closed. For the most part, it stands open to those vague and wandering sounds which rather serve to convey a sense of companionship than to interrupt thought and dissipate interest. The deepest studies sometimes miss their best results because they are too solitary. The scholar must keep out of the bustle of active life; but if he cross the line of sympathy, if he lose touch with his day and his fellows, there is an end of his usefulness. Nothing interprets a great book or a great picture like human life; it is the only commentary on the growth of art which is worth studying, for in it alone are to be found the secrets and the meaning of art. The scholar must always be in the best sense a man of the world: one by whom the faces and souls of men are daily read with the insight of sympathy; one to whom the great movement of humanity is the supreme fact to be felt, to be studied, to be interpreted. It is this vital relation to his own age which distinguishes the scholar from the pedant-the man to whom the heart of knowledge reveals itself from the man whose fellow

ship with the past is always only "dust to dust, ashes to ashes."

It was just this vitality, this living relation to living things, which separated the first great modern scholar from the generations of forgotten Dry-asDusts who preceded him. Petrarch really escaped from a sepulcher when he stepped out of the cloister of medievalism, with its crucifix, its pictures of unhealthy saints, its cords of self-flagellation, and found the heavens clear, beautiful, and well worth living under, and the world full of good things which one might desire and yet not be given over to evil. He ventured to look at life for himself, and he found it full of wonderful power and dignity. He opened his Virgil, brushed aside the cobwebs which monkish brains had spun over the beautiful lines, and met the old poet as one man meets another; and, lo! there rose before him a new, untrodden, and wholly human world, free from priestcraft and pedantry, near to nature, and unspeakably alluring and satisfying. Digging down through a vast overgrowth of superstition and pedantry, Petrarch found the real soil of life once more, and found that antiquity had its roots there quite as much as medievalism; that the Greeks and Romans were flesh and blood quite as truly as the imageworshiping Italians. Then came the inevitable thought that these men were not outcasts from the grace and care of heaven, "dead and damned heathen," whose civilization had been a mere worth

less husk to protect the later Christian society, but that they belonged in the divinely appointed order of history, had lived their lives and done their work and gone to their rest as the later generations were doing. The moment Petrarch understood these very simple but then very radical truths his whole attitude toward the past was changed; it was no longer a forbidden country, but a fresh, untrodden world, rich in all manner of noble activities and experiences, full of character, significance, divinity. There is no need to recall the mighty stirrings of soul that followed; in Humanism the mind had come into fresh contact with life and received a new and overmastering impulse. The new learning ran like fire over Italy; old men forsook their vices for the charms of scholarship, young men exchanged their pleasures for the garb and habits of the student; the air was charged with the electricity of new thought, and all minds turned to the future with a prophetic sense of the great new age on whose threshold they stood.

It was inevitable that in the course of time Humanism itself should become pedantic and formal, should lose its hold upon the turbulent and restless life about it, and should finally give place to a later and still more vital scholarship. Nothing pauses in the sublime evolution of history; there is no place of rest in that pilgrimage which is an eternal truth seeking. It would be interesting to trace the inner history of the learning which Petrarch and Boccac