[1] The most remarkable document regarding the body of Julia which has yet been published is a Latin letter, written by Bartholomaeus Fontius to his friend Franciscus Saxethus, minutely describing her, with details which appear to prove that he had not only seen but handled the corpse.  It is printed in Janitschek, Die Gesellschaft der R. in It.:  Stuttgart, 1879, p. 120.

Then came the third age of scholarship—­the age of the critics, philologers, and printers.  What had been collected by Poggio and Aurispa had now to be explained by Ficino, Poliziano, and Erasmus.  They began their task by digesting and arranging the contents of the libraries.  There were then no short cuts to learning, no comprehensive lexicons, no dictionaries of antiquities, no carefully prepared thesauri of mythology and history.  Each student had to hold in his brain the whole mass of classical erudition.  The text and the canon of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and the tragedians had to be decided.  Greek type had to be struck.  Florence, Venice, Basle, Lyons, and Paris groaned with printing presses.  The Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben toiled by night and day, employing scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty brain, whose work it was to ascertain the right reading of sentences, to accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place beyond the reach of monkish hatred or of envious time that everlasting solace of humanity which exists in the classics.  All subsequent achievements in the field of scholarship sink into insignificance beside the labors of these men, who needed genius, enthusiasm, and the sympathy of Europe for the accomplishment of their titanic task.  Virgil was printed in 1470, Homer in 1488, Aristotle in 1498, Plato in 1513.  They then became the inalienable heritage of mankind.  But what vigils, what anxious expenditure of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectation, were endured by those heroes of humanizing scholarship, whom we are apt to think of merely as pedants!  Which of us now warms and thrills with emotion at hearing the name of Aldus Manutius, or of Henricus Stephanus, or of Johannes Froben?  Yet this we surely ought to do; for to them we owe in a great measure the freedom of our spirit, our stores of intellectual enjoyment, our command of the past, our certainty of the future of human culture.

This third age in the history of the Renaissance Scholarship may be said to have reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this time Italy had handed on the torch of learning to the northern nations.  The publication of his “Adagia” in 1500, marks the advent of a more critical and selective spirit, which from that date onward has been gradually gaining strength in the modern mind.  Criticism, in the true sense of accurate testing and sifting, is one of the points which distinguish the moderns from the ancients; and criticism was developed by the process of assimilation, comparison, and appropriation, which was necessary