Henry M. Baird · 52 of 379

CHAPTER I · Era of the Renaissance.

The most enviable distinction of the reign of Francis the First consisted in the fact that it was the era of that extraordinary development of the fine arts and of literature known as the Renaissance. Illustrious during the Middle Ages, and foremost in the pursuit of scholastic learning, France had unfortunately lost that proud eminence when the revival of letters enkindled elsewhere a new passion for discovery. Her adventurous sons had taken the lead in the crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but three hundred years later no expeditions were fitted out in her ports to explore and appropriate the virgin territories beyond the western sea. The art of printing and the impulse given to astronomical research originated abroad. The famous mediæval seat of learning seemed to have been suddenly visited with a premature decay. Even the exiled scholars of the East, fleeing before Turkish barbarism, disdained to settle in a country where the treasures of ancient science which they had brought with them from Mount Athos and Constantinople were so inadequately appreciated.