But what vigils, what anxious expenditure of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectation, were endured by those heroes of humanizing scholarship, whom we are apt to think of merely as pedants! Which of us now warms and thrills with emotion at hearing the name of Aldus Manutius, or of Henricus Stephanus, or of Johannes Froben?
Yet this we surely ought to do; for to them we owe in a great measure the freedom of our spirit, our stores of intellectual enjoyment, our command of the past, our certainty of the future of human culture.
This third age in the history of the Renaissance Scholarship may be said to have reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this time Italy had handed on the torch of learning to the northern nations.

The publication of his "Adagia" in 1500, marks the advent of a more critical and selective spirit, which from that date onward has been gradually gaining strength in the modern mind.

Criticism, in the true sense of accurate testing and sifting, is one of the points which distinguish the moderns from the ancients; and criticism was developed by the process of assimilation, comparison, and appropriation, which was necessary in the growth of scholarship.

The ultimate effect of this recovery of classic literature was, once and for all, to liberate the intellect.

The modern world was brought into close contact with the free virility of the ancient world, and emancipated from the thralldom of unproved traditions.