upon the place in which I do my daily work as an academy of learning; I go to it rather as to a mill in which I must grind out my tale of worthless grain.  Muretus, when he had labored twenty years in the chair of rhetoric at Rome, begged for dismissal.  His memorial to the authorities presents a lamentable picture of the insubordination and indifference from which he had suffered.[141] ’I have borne immeasurable indignities from the continued insolence of these students, who interrupt me with cries, whistlings, hisses, insults, and such opprobrious remarks that I sometimes scarcely know whether I am standing on my head or heels.’  ’They come to the lecture-room armed with poignards, and when I reprove them for their indecencies, they threaten over and over again to cut my face open if I do not hold my tongue.’  The walls, he adds, are scrawled over with obscene emblems and disgusting epigrams, so that this haunt of learning presents the aspect of the lowest brothel; and the professor’s chair has become a more intolerable seat than the pillory, owing to the missiles flung at him and the ribaldry with which he is assailed.  The manners and conversation of the students must have been disgusting beyond measure, to judge by a letter of complaint from a father detailing the contamination to which his son was exposed in the Roman class-rooms, and the immunity with which the lewdest songs were publicly recited there.[142] But the total degradation of learning at this epoch in Rome is best described in one paragraph of Vittorio de’Rossi, setting forth the neglect endured by Aldo Manuzio, the younger.  This scion of an illustrious family succeeded to the professorship of Muretus in 1588.  ‘Then,’ says Rossi, ’might one marvel at or rather mourn over, the abject and down-trodden state of the liberal arts.  Then might one perceive with tears how those treasures of humane letters, which our fathers exalted to the heavens, were degraded in the estimation of youth.  In the good old days men crossed the seas, undertook long journeys, traversed the cities of Greece and Asia, in order to obtain the palm of eloquence and salute the masters of languages and learning, at whose feet they sat entranced by noble words.  But now these fellows poured scorn upon an unrivaled teacher of both Greek and Latin eloquence, whose services were theirs for the asking, theirs without the fatigue of travel, without expense, without exertion.  Though he freely offered them his abundance of erudition in both learned literatures, they shut their ears against him.  At the hours when his lecture-room should have been thronged with multitudes of eager pupils you might see him, abandoned by the crowd, pacing the pavement before the door of the academy with one, or may be two, for his companions.’[143]

[Footnote 140:  Dejob, Marc Antoine Muret, p. 349.]

[Footnote 141:  The original is printed by Dejob, Marc Antoine Muret, pp. 487-489.]