Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: "Standing nloof in giant Ignorance, Of thec I hear and of (he Cyrludci, As one who sits ashore and longs perchance To visit dolphin-corul in deep seas." ' Nevertheless he never abandoned the task of studying and commenting upon the treasured pages. If early tradition be true, death, when it came, found him busy in his library over Pilato's Odyssey.1 The part of Petrarch and Boccaccio in the revival of Greek V scholarship in the West may be briefly summarized ns follows. They were the first men of influence to feel an ambition to read Greek literature In the original, and to express that ambition in words that made a lasting impression. They were also the firsi to inquire after artistic masterpieces heretofore ignored, after Homer and Kuripidcs, as well as more y didactic authors. They aimed to be humanists in Greek as in Latin. Against the overwhelming dominance of Aristotle they sought to oppose Plato. Their actual accomplishments fell far short of their desires. They never learned to read Greek. They knew but one new author in translation, Homer. Their stock of laboriously acquired information, linguistic and historical, was dubious in quality, soon to become totally discredited. They concluded by pronouncing Greek culture at its best inferior to Latin. But they set the fashion in literary circles of longing for more knowledge. They reminded Western Kuropc after generations of satisfied Ignorance of what It had forgotten. They reintroduccd Homer to Italy. The poverty of their translation was a stimulus to the production of a better in the following century. In short they gave the starting impulse to the movement which was to restore Greek literature in its original form to a place in the education of every cultivated European. 'I...i-,. ,-",/,'.--,-,-,. 1 Nolhac, pp. 3...