The philosophy
of Plato, the power of the Athenian drama, and the learning of the
Stagyrite, were a new impulse to literature. Before the close of the
fifteenth century, Greek was taught at Oxford, and men marvelled as they
read that "musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects
of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy," a knowledge of
which had been before entirely lost in the West. Thus was perfected what
is known as the revival of letters, when classical learning came to enrich
and modify the national literatures, if it did temporarily retard the
vernacular progress. The Humanists carried the day against the
Obscurantists; and, as scholarship had before consisted in a thorough
knowledge of Latin, it now also included a knowledge of Greek, which
presented noble works of poetry, eloquence, and philosophy, and gave us a
new idiom for the terminologies of science.
INVENTION OF PRINTING.--Nor was this all. This great wealth of learning
would have still remained a dead letter to the multitude, and, in the
main, a useless treasure even to scholars, had it not been for a simple
yet marvellous invention of the same period.
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