COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 623
two poets,
linked together by the closest ties of friendship,
Petrarch and Boccacio. A monk of Calabria, Barlaam, who
had long resided in Greece under the patronage of the Emperor
Andronicus, was the instructor of both*. They were the first to
begin to make a careful collection of Roman and Greek manuscripts
; and a taste for a comparison of languages had even been
awakened in Petrarchf, \\hose philological acumen seemed to
strive towards the attainment of a more general contemplation
of the universe. Kmanucl Chrysoloras, who was sent as
Greek ambassador to Italy and England (1391), Cardinal
Bessarion of Trebisond, Gemistus Pietho, and the Athenian
Demetrius Chalcondylas, to whom we owe the first printed
edition of Homer, were all valuable promoters of the study of
the Greek writersJ. All these came from Greece before the
eventful taking of Constantinople, (29th May 1453;) Constantine
Lascaris alone, whose forefathers had once sat on the
Byzantine throne, came later to
Italy. He brought with him
a precious collection of Greek manuscripts, now buried in the
rarely used library of the Escurial. The first Greek book
was printed only fourteen years before the discovery of
America, although the invention of printing, was probably
made simultaneously and wholly independently, by Guttenberg
in Strasburg and Mayence, and by Lorenz Yansson
Koster at Haarlem, between 1436 and 1439, and, therefore, in
the fortunate period of the first immigration of the learned
Greeks into Italy. ||
*
Heeren, Gesch. der dassisclien Litteratur, bd. i. s. 284-290.
t Klaproth, Memoires relatives a I'Asie, t. iii. p. 113.
t The Florentine edition of Homer of 1488; but the first printed
Greek book was the grammar of Constantine Lascaris. in 1476.
Villemain, Melanges historiques et litteraires, t. ii. p. 135.
|| The result of the investigations of the librarian Ludwig Wachler,
at Breslau (see his Geschichte der Litteratur, 1833, th. i. s. 12-23).
Printing without moveable types does not go back, even in China, beyond
the beginning of the tenth century of our era. The first four books
of Confucius were printed, according to Klaproth, in the province of
Sziitschun, between 890 and 925 ; and the description of the technical
manipulation of the Chinese printing press might have been read in
western countries even as early as 1310, in Raschid-eddin's Persian history
of the rulers of Khatai. According to the most recent results of
the important researches of Stanislas Julien, however, an ironsmith in
China itself, between the years 1041 and 1048 A.D., or almost 400 years
before Guttenberg, would seem to have used moveable types, made of