in flimsily disguised revolt against Christian dogma and morality, Pomponius Laetus and Platina founded the Roman Academy—­an institution destined to world-wide celebrity.  Pomponius Laetus, an unrecognised bastard of the noble house of Sanseverini, was professor of eloquence in Rome.  Great amongst the humanists, in him the very spirit of ancient Hellas seemed revived.  What to many was but the fad or fashionable craze of the hour, was to him the all-important and absorbing purpose of living.  He dwelt aloof in poverty; shunning the ante-chambers and tables of the great, he and kindred souls communed with their disciples in the shades of his grove of classic laurels.  He was indifferent alike to princely and to popular favour, passionately consecrating his efforts to the revival and preservation of such classics as had survived the destructive era known as the Dark Ages.  Denied a name of his own, he adopted a Latin one to his liking, thus from necessity setting a fashion his imitators followed from affectation.  When approached in the days of his fame by the Sanseverini with proposals to recognise him as a kinsman, he answered with a proud and laconic refusal.[5] The Academy, formed of super-men infected with pagan ideals, contemptuous of scholastic learning and impatient of the restraints of Christian morality, did not long escape the suspicions of the orthodox; suspicions only too well warranted and inevitably productive of antagonism ending in condemnation.[6]

[Note 5:  His refusal was in the following curt form:  Pomponius Laetus cognatis et propinquis suis, salutem.  Quod petitis fieri non potest.—­Valete.  Consult Tiraboschi, Storia della Letteratura Italiana, vol. vii., cap. v.; Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom in Mittelalter; Burkhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, and Voigt in his Wiederlebung des Klassischen Alterthums.]

[Note 6:  Sabellicus, in a letter to Antonio Morosini (Liber Epistolarum, xi., p. 459) wrote thus of Pomponius Laetus:  ..._fuit ab initio contemptor religionis, sed ingravesciente aetate coepit res ipsa, ut mibi dicitur curae esse.  In Crispo et Livio reposint quaedam; et si nemo religiosius timidiusques tractavit veterum scripta ...  Graeca ... vix attingit_.  While to a restricted number, humanism stood for intellectual emancipation, to the many it meant the rejection of the moral restraints on conduct imposed by the law of the Church, and a revival of the vices that flourished in the decadent epochs of Greece and Rome.]

From trifles, as they may seem to us at this distance of time, hostile ingenuity wove the web destined to enmesh the incautious Academicians.  The adoption of fanciful Latin appellations—­in itself a sufficiently innocent conceit—­was construed into a demonstration of revolt against established Christian usage, almost savouring of contempt for the canonised saints of the Church.