actions; this is better than giving to our enemies a chance of
slandering us." ¹⁰ The caste spirit is evident here.

Naturally, if the Pope was slower in honoring his secular
priesthood than he was in honoring the members of the ec-
clesiastical hierarchy, the Humanists blew their tops off. But
this has but a trifling importance. The words of the best
Humanists ring out with a genuine and conventual contempt
for wordly goods, with an almost Franciscan love for study. It
is senseless to credit the birth of Humanism to the discovery of
the codices; what happened, instead, was exactly the reverse.

It should by now have become clear why, in spite of so
many humanistic precedents in the Middle Ages, it was ex-
clusively Petrarch who, after the dantean meteor, was recog-
nized as the initiator and master of Humanism ("spes unica
nostri," Boccaccio calls him). Nor was Petrarch (without
sinning by excessive modesty, naturally), far from right when,
in his last years, he placed himself at the beginning of a new
age. "Such is my boast, he said, haec nostra studia multis
neglecta saeculis, multorum me ingeniis per Italiam excitasse,
et fortasse longius Italia." ( Senilia, XVII, 2.)

It is now easy for us to discern the main lines of the struc-
ture of ideas built by the Humanists.

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