At the end of his sixty-fifth chapter Gibbon leaves Constantinople hanging on the brink of destruction, and paints in glowing colours the military virtues of its deadly enemies, the Ottomans.

Then he interposes one of his most finished chapters, of miscellaneous contents, but terminating in the grand and impressive pages on the revival of learning in Italy.

There we read of the "curiosity and emulation of the Latins," of the zeal of Petrarch and the success of Boccace in Greek studies, of Leontius, Pilatus, Bessarion, and Lascaris.

A glow of sober enthusiasm warms the great scholar as he paints the early light of that happy dawn.

He admits that the "arms of the Turks pressed the flight of the Muses" from Greece to Italy.