There will always be found, in that case something for you
to do, however many you may be." But in this Aldine mansion only the
most-learned men of letters gathered, and Greek was the sole language
permitted in its discussions.
One of the _habitues_ of the Aldine Club was chief among this noble
company of the Morosini. He was a grave, scholarly man who listened and
questioned much out of a seemingly inexhaustible fund of historic,
legal, and ecclesiastical knowledge--a man who had the power of
stimulating others, and whose rare word, when uttered, was of value. He
had opinions gathered at first hand from influential minds of every land
and creed to contribute to the talk when it flowed in narrowing
channels; and he himself came thither for refreshment from abstruse
studies, out of a quiet cell in the convent of the Servi, while
seemingly unaware that many a stranger begged for an invitation to the
palazzo Morosini in the hope of an introduction to this "miracle of
Venice."
Perhaps this grave friar, apparently so careless of his distinction, was
the unsuspected intellectual thread which bound, as it were, together
the various influential circles of Venice; for in every centre, plebeian
or patrician, where there was anything new to be mooted or anything of
value to be discussed, he was a visitor so welcome and so frequent that
he might well have exerted a steady, unifying influence upon Venetian
thought.
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