Easy for us, looking back over the traversed maze with chart in hand, to understand the plan of it! Easy enough to talk of renaissance and glorious morning–tide spring of human thought! To those in the thick of the sweltering struggle, it was as the eve of dissolution and universal cataclysm.
CHAPTER II.
Troublous new times in Ferrara—How a French King's daughter became a Duchess—Bygones were aught but bygones—and Mitre and Cowl were lords of all.
Previously to this celebrated era of "renaissance," all the business of education, such as it was, had necessarily been in the hands of the clergy. But the well–known circumstances which at the beginning of the sixteenth century led to a new zeal for the study of the languages of ancient Greece and Home, led also to the creation of a totally new class of teachers. The most eminent professors of the new learning were men, whose position made it necessary that their acquirements should be made a means of gaining a livelihood. And they became therefore for the most part professional teachers. They were also generally laymen. A body of lay pedagogues was a new thing in the world; and surely one of no small significance. For though these men professed simply to give instruction in the Greek or in the Latin tongue and literature, not to educate their pupils, yet the mass of idea, unstamped by the ecclesiastical mint, which was necessarily thus circulated, must have exercised an influence, which has perhaps not been estimated at its worth, in inquiries into the causes of the mental tendencies of that period.
PEREGRINO MORATO.
Among the number of learned laymen, thus independently exercising the profession of teacher, we find a certain Peregrino or Pellegrino Morato, a native of Mantua, established at Ferrara early in the sixteenth century. He had, we are told, many of the nobility of Ferrara for his pupils; and had already acquired considerable reputation by his teaching in several cities of Italy.[33] All that has reached us concerning him concurs to produce the impression that Morato must have been an estimable and worthy man; among which testimonies may perhaps be reckoned the fact of his continued poverty, notwithstanding his success as a teacher, and the lofty position of some among his pupils.