half of the fifteenth century escaped from Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are the heroes of this second period.  It was an age of accumulation, of uncritical and indiscriminate enthusiasm.  Manuscripts were worshiped by these men, just as the reliques of Holy Land had been adored by their great-grandfathers.  The eagerness of the Crusades was revived in this quest of the Holy Grail of ancient knowledge.  Waifs and strays of Pagan authors were valued like precious gems, reveled in like odoriferous and gorgeous flowers, consulted like oracles of God, gazed on like the eyes of a beloved mistress.  The good, the bad, and the indifferent received an almost equal homage.  Criticism had not yet begun.  The world was bent on gathering up its treasures, frantically bewailing the lost books of Livy, the lost songs of Sappho—­absorbing to intoxication the strong wine of multitudinous thoughts and passions that kept pouring from those long-buried amphora of inspiration.  What is most remarkable about this age of scholarship is the enthusiasm which pervaded all classes in Italy for antique culture.  Popes and princes, captains of adventure and peasants, noble ladies and the leaders of the demi-monde, alike became scholars.  There is a story told by Infessura which illustrates the temper of the times with singular felicity.  On the 18th of April 1485 a report circulated in Rome that some Lombard workmen had discovered a Roman sarcophagus while digging on the Appian Way.  It was a marble tomb, engraved with the inscription, ‘Julia, Daughter of Claudius,’ and inside the coffer lay the body of a most beautiful girl of fifteen years, preserved by precious unguents from corruption and the injury of time.  The bloom of youth was still upon her cheeks and lips; her eyes and mouth were half open; her long hair floated round her shoulders.  She was instantly removed, so goes the legend, to the Capitol; and then began a procession of pilgrims from all the quarters of Rome to gaze upon this saint of the old Pagan world.  In the eyes of those enthusiastic worshipers, her beauty was beyond imagination or description:  she was far fairer than any woman of the modern age could hope to be.  At last Innocent viii. feared lest the orthodox faith should suffer by this new cult of a heathen corpse.  Julia was buried secretly and at night by his direction, and naught remained in the Capitol but her empty marble coffin.  The tale, as told by Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in Nantiporto with slight variations.  One says that the girl’s hair was yellow, another that it was of the glossiest black.  What foundation for the legend may really have existed need not here be questioned.  Let us rather use the mythus as a parable of the ecstatic devotion which prompted the men of that age to discover a form of unimaginable beauty in the tomb of the classic world.[1]