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The tragic history of those manuscripts adds to the mystery of Leonardo's legend. Left by the Master to the faithful disciple Francesco Melzi, they have been robbed, sacked, bargained away, exchanged, sold, torn into pieces, and scattered all over Europe. The largest part of them once belonged to the Milanese Biblioteca Ambrosiana. When the "delivering " army of Napoleon succeeded in conquering Lombardy, they were sent over, as a legitimate prey of war, to Paris. One code only, the famous "Codice Atlantico," was, later, restored to Milan; the remaining eleven are mostly still to be found in Paris.

New Italy has decided to publish everything Leonardo's hand has left. But how will such a gigantic design, which would bring great honour to a country and to a generation, be carried through ? One of the chief conditions, in my opinion, ought to be that all the European nations, states and private individuals who happen to possess any precious relics of the Master should be willing to hand them over, in order to bring the complete "corpus" of his writings and drawings together once more. Who ought to propose such a scheme? I do not know. If a League of Nations is likely to exist in the future, and to deal with the highest problems of humanity, without which it would become a mere academy, one of the finest proposals it could decide upon would be, I think, an attempted reconstruction of this incomparable treasure, to the benefit of every nation and every future generation.

And if that " corpus "should be restored to Italy it would not be a too generous gift after all.

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80 AN ALL-EMBRACING GENIUS: LEODARDO DA VINCI.

The world was made richer by Italy, in the past centuries and in our times. But the world, alas, has too often forgotten, and is still forgetting, what Italy has given to it.

JUAN LUIS VIVES: A SCHOLAR OF THE

RENASCENCE, 1492–1540.

BY PROFESSOR FOSTER WATSON, F.R.S.L.

[Read March 24th, 1920.]

IN a celebrated book, 'Les Eloges des Hommes Sçavans,' Utrecht, 1696, A. Teissier says: "Budé, Erasmus and Vives were the most learned men of their century, and, as it were, the triumvirs of the Republic of Letters in the first quarter of the sixteenth century." Budé, the great restorer of Greek studies, was one of the glories of France as the founder (1530) of the Corporation of the Royal Readers, which constituted the origin of the Collège de France. It was mainly through Budé that the leadership in scholarship passed from Italy to France. Budé clearly will never fall out of remembrance.

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Erasmus, less specialised as a Greek scholar than Budé, was much wider in general contemporaneous influence. In the Republic of Letters he was, so to say, President. He was the great educator of Europe in his Praise of Folly,' in his Encomium Moriae,' in his 'Colloquies,' and in his 'Adagia,' in his Greek Testament with Latin translation, in his editions of the early Church Fathers, and in his epistolæ, revealing his wide circle of correspondents. He was consultantscholar and scholar-dictator of Europe. He was, let us say, the whole of Harley Street as scholarphysician in letters, to the whole educated world.

VOL. I, N.S.

6

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No wonder, then, that the age of 1500-1536 is known as the "age of Erasmus." Most readers only care to retain in mind one name to mark an age. So the name of Budé gets dropped except in France, and Erasmus monopolises the age-in the mind of the ordinary scholar. And so the third member of the literary triumvirate, Vives, sinks into oblivion in general reputation. It is no use to urge that Teissier tells us that his own age (nearly 200 years after Vives) regarded Erasmus as the intellect, Budé as the eloquence, and Vives as the representative of the judgment, of the Triumvirate. Even Teissier himself and his estimates in his Eloges des Hommes Sçavans' are now unremembered excepting by a comparatively few scholars.

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To add to this crowding-out process, it remains to be said that Sainte-Beuve, the magician who resuscitated so many writers of the Renascence, did not pause before the life and work of Vives, nor did any great European critic of the nineteenth century turn his attention to him except in Spain. As French critics, constantly and lovingly, kept the great name of Budé before the national scholarly consciousness, Spanish critics developed the grounds of scholarly indebtedness to Vives, and, in fact, eventually establish a cult, the study of which is distinguished in Spain by the term "vivismo."

If we are asked (1) Why, then, should we concern ourselves with Vives? the answer is, that the Spanish scholars, with a marvellous past in their national history, which we in Great Britain rarely take into our intimate thoughts, regard him as one of their outstanding personalities-their greatest sixteenth

century typical scholar. Sympathy with national self-consciousness of a friendly country is a sufficient reason for our neighbourly interest.

(2) But there is a further reason. In the nineteenth century, scholarship directed itself particularly to the study of sources and origins. Very thorough and competent work was done-very often and very largely, let us candidly say, by Germany, but let us add immediately, not by Germany alone. For instance, Mr. J. A. Symonds, in his five large volumes, writes as illuminating an account of the Italian Renascence as Burckhardt, the German, wrote in presenting his remarkable research on, the same object. Such books made the Italian Renascence very vivid and very picturesque to English readers, and the sources of modern thought discernible in Italian Renascence thinkers and artists became widely known amongst European scholars and students.

But, after all, though we all delight in the wonderful colours and lights and shades of the early days of the Italian Renascence, and though we follow with reverent gaze the still more developed (because later) scholarship and thought of Huguenot France, even Italy and France together do not fill up the whole outlook on the origins and sources of modern thought, of national endeavour, and of individual energy and pioneer literary experience and intuition. Spain has been hitherto much neglected in. our studies, mainly because it has suffered eclipse due to its historical vicissitudes, in some of the intervening centuries from the sixteenth century onwards. But since the nineteenth century has conVOL. I, N.S.

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