"The Homes of Humanism"

Dr. J. E. Sandys, of Cambridge, England, delivered the fifth of the Lane lectures in the Fogg Lecture Room last night on "The Homes of Humanism; a Classical Tour in Italy during the Revival of Learning."

Dr. Sandys graphically described the homes of the Italian humanists--the scholars of the Renaissance--by taking his audience in an imaginary journey through the principal Italian cities of the fifteenth century. Leaving Florence we enter Venice, the portal through which Greek literature passed from the East to the West, and crossing back to the mainland, we proceed to the stately city of Parma. To the humanists it was a place of transient rather than of permanent abode, yet its interest in the classics was exemplified in 1413 by the sensation created there over the alleged discovery of the bones of Livy. From here we turn southward to Mantua with its undying memories of Virgil, and thence to Ferrara, celebrated for the massive towers of its moated castle. Dr. Sandys then touched upon Naples, where we may see the lofty arch of the Castello Nuovo. Here the centre of classic interest lies in the tomb of Virgil, over which Petrarch is said to have planted a laured tree. At Naples flourished the critic Laurentius Valla, who afterwards lived in Rome under the patronage of Pope Nicholas V.

In 1527, the lecturer concluded, the political entanglement caused by Pope Clement VII culminated in that appalling event, the sack of Rome by the Spanish and German troops of Charles V.--an event which in Italy at least marked the end of that great epoch known as the Revival of Learning.

The last lecture of the series, on "The History of Ciceronianism," will be given in the Fogg Lecture Room tomorrow evening at 8 o'clock. The lecture will be open to the public.