new organisations; and these preliminary distinctions and discussions will enable us to set the Latin, or Classical Renaissance, in its true relation to the Teutonic or religious.
We begin with the most obvious of the influences exercised by the Revival of Letters upon the thought of the sixteenth century, viz., those concerned with grammar and what it signified, and with language as the creation and the interpreter of thought. It has often been said that the Church preserved the knowledge of Latin as a living tongue; but Lorenzo Valla (1406-57) would have said, if the tongue were still alive it were better dead. As a grammarian Valla held grammar to be higher than dialectic, for it took as many years to learn as dialectic took months; and he may be said to have discovered literary and historical criticism by executing with its help judgment on three famous documents, viz., the Vulgate, which he condemned as faulty in style and incorrect in translation; the Donation of Constantine, which he proved by its anachronisms to be late and false and forged; and the Apostolic Symbol, whose terms and clauses he showed could not be of apostolic origin. His criticism of these documents (we omit all reference to that of the pseudo-Dionysius) was prophetic and more potent in a later generation than in his own. Erasmus published in 1505 the Ânnota-tiones on the Vulgate, and in a dedication which served as a preface he compared Valla as a grammarian and Nicolas of Lyra as a theologian; and he argued from the errors which had been proved to exist in the version which the Church had in a sense canonised by use, in a way that was at once an apology and a call for his own edition of the Greek New Testament nine years before it appeared. In 1517 a copy of the De Donatïone Constantini Magni came into the hands of Ulrich von Hütten, who published it, and with his usual careless audacity dedicated it to the Pope, whom he straightway proceeded to denounce as a usurper and robber. Later this was sent to Luther just as he was meditating his De Captivitate Babylonien Ecclesiae; and it strengthened his trust in the German people, confirmed him in the belief that the Pope was Antichrist, and fortified him for the daring deed of burning the Pope's Bull. The criticism of the Apostles' Creed indicated a method of discussing dogma which only needed to be applied to become a theory of development capable of dissolving the vast systems of the traditional schools. We need not be surprised that Calvin speaks of Valla as " an acute and judicious man, and an instrument of the Divine Will."
The Italian mind was simple in spite of all its subtle complexity, and in the Renaissance it was like the explorer who set out to find a new way to India and found a new world instead. It had no more typical son than Giovanni Pico délia Mirandola. He was-if we are to believe his nephew and biographer-chivalrous, beautiful, radiant, a man it was impossible to see without loving, an artist who loved art, a thinker who
