zeal for literature, who sold his soul to praise the Massacre of S. Bartholomew and purge by fulsome panegyrics of great public crimes the taint of heresy that clung around him, found his efforts to extend the course of studies in Rome thwarted.[138] He was forbidden to lecture on Plato, forbidden to touch jurisprudence, forbidden to consult a copy of Eunapius in the Vatican Library.  It cost him days and weeks of pleading to obtain permission to read Tacitus to his classes.  Greek, the literature of high thoughts, noble enthusiasms, and virile sciences, was viewed with suspicion.  As the monks of the middle ages had written on the margins of their MSS.:  Graeca sunt, ergo non legenda, so these new obscurantists exclaimed:  Graeca sunt, periculosa sunt, ergo non legenda.  ‘I am forced,’ he cries in this extremity, ’to occupy myself with Latin and to abstain entirely from Greek.’  And yet he knew that ’if the men of our age advance one step further in their neglect of Greek, doom and destruction are impending over all sound arts and sciences.’  ‘It is my misery,’ he groans, ’to behold the gradual extinction and total decay of Greek letters, in whose train I see the whole body of refined learning on the point of vanishing away.[139]

A vigorous passage from one of Sarpi’s letters directly bearing on these points may here be cited (vol. i. p. 170):  ’The revival of polite learning undermined the foundations of Papal monarchy.  Nor was this to be wondered at.  This monarchy began and grew in barbarism; the cessation of barbarism naturally curtailed and threatened it with extinction.  This we already see in Germany and France; but Spain and Italy are still subject to barbarism.  Legal studies sink daily from bad to worse.  The Roman Curia opposes every branch of learning which savors of polite literature, while it defends its barbarism with tooth and nail.  How can it do otherwise?  Abolish those books on Papal Supremacy, and where shall they find that the Pope is another God, that he is almighty, that all rights and laws are closed within the cabinet of his breast, that he can shut up folk in hell, in a word that he has power to square the circle?  Destroy that false jurisprudence, and this tyranny will vanish; but the two are reciprocally supporting, and we shall not do away with the former until the latter falls, which will only happen at God’s good pleasure.’

[Footnote 138:  See Dejob’s Life of Muret, pp. 231, 238, 274, 320.]

[Footnote 139:  Op. cit. pp. 262, 481.]

The jealousy with which liberal studies were regarded by the Church bred a contempt for them in the minds of students.  Benci, a professor of humane letters at Rome, says that his pupils walked about the class-room during his lectures.  With grim humor he adds that he does not object to their sleeping, so long as they abstain from snoring.[140] But it is impossible, he goes on to complain, that I should any longer look