A company of a grammarian’s pupils are bearing their master’s coffin for burial at the summit of a mountain. One of them tells his story and dilates on the praises of the departed scholar. They cannot fittingly bury their master on the plain with the common folk. He shall rest on a peak whose height excels the rest.

The grammarian was born with the graces of face and form, like Apollo’s. But his youth had been given to learning till he became shrunken and leaden-eyed. Meanwhile, he despised what other men termed life. Before living he would learn how to live. Deeper he bent over his books. He was racked by stone (calculi) and by bronchitis (tussis), but he still refused to rest. He had a sacred thirst for knowledge alone. He magnified the mind and let the body decay uncared for. That he long lived nameless was nothing to him. And thus, even in his death-struggle, he ground at Greek grammar. And so, where the “lightnings are loosened, and stars come and go” this lofty man was left “lofty-lying”.

The renaissance scholar has sacrificed worldly success and well-being to the single-minded pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Life in time means nothing to him because he believes in immortality. Here is a contrast of the worldling, the “low man” who is content with petty achievements, and the “high man” who aims beyond his reach and fails but finds his reward only in heaven.

That low man goes on adding one to one,

His hundred’s is soon hit:

The high man, aiming at a million

Misses an unit.

The cortege winding its way steadily, up the mountain-side until it achieves the summit with its unlimited panorama, becomes a symbol of life spent in unrelenting effort until it attains that infinite expansion of the designs and talents of man, which the scholar anticipates with such sublime faith. Are we then to suppose that the story singles out for special commendation a life devoted with almost ludicrous heroism to the scientific detail of philosophy?

The answer is: It is not only the lofty aim but, the energy and the effort displayed in its pursuit that is the criterion of judgment. Hence from a worldly point of view the grammarian might seem a failure, but to the speaker, the pupil, he is a hero.

The grammarian-scholar’s scrupulous and unwearied pursuit of the minutiae of classical learning constitutes a graphic depiction of Renaissance Humanism, perhaps pointing also, to the nature of what heroism should be, and of the importance of continuous and relentless endeavour in our very own search for truths, be they philosophical, psychological, or spiritual.