We also owe it to romanticism that a relation was established for the first time and a fusion effected between the learned and the historians, between those who sought out material and thinkers. This, as we have said, had not happened in the eighteenth century, nor, to tell the truth, before it, in the great epochs of erudition of Italian or Alexandrian humanism, for then antiquaries and politicians each followed their own path, indifferent to one another, and the only political ideal that sometimes gleamed from the bookshelves of the antiquary (as Fueter acutely observes of Flavius Blondus) was that of a government which by ensuring calm should permit the learned to follow their peaceful avocations! But the watchword of romantic historiography was anticipated in respect to this matter also by Vico, in his formula of the _union_ of _philosophy_ with _philology,_ and of the reciprocal _conversion_ of the _true_ with the _certain,_ of the idea with the fact. This formula proves (we give it passing mention) that the historical saying of Manzoni, to the effect that Vico should be united with Muratori, was not altogether historically exact--that is to say, philosophy with erudition, for Vico had already united these two things, and their union constitutes the chief value of his work. Nevertheless, notwithstanding its inaccuracy, the saying of Manzoni also proves how romantic historiography had noted the intimate connexion that prevails between erudition and thought in history, which is the living and thinking again of the document that has been preserved or restored by erudition, and indeed demands erudition that it may be sought out and prepared. Neither did romanticism limit itself to stating this claim in the abstract, but really created the type of the philologist-thinker (who was sometimes also a poet), from Niebuhr to Mommsen, from Thierry to Fustel de Coulanges, from Troya to Balbo or Tosti. Then for the first time were the great collections and repertories of the erudition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries valued at their true worth; then were new collections promoted, supplementary to or correcting them according to criteria that were ever more rigorous in relation to the subject and to the greater knowledge and means at disposal. Thus arose the work known as the _Monumenta Germania historica_ and the German philological school (which was once the last and became the first), the one a model of undertakings of this sort, the other of the disciplines relating to them, for the rest of Europe. The philological claim of the new historiography, aided by the sentiment of nationality, also gave life in our Italy to those historical societies, to those collections of chronicles, of laws, of charters, of 'historical archives' or reviews, institutions with which historiographical work is concerned in our day. A notable example of the power to promote the most patient philology inspired with purely historical needs is to be found, among others, in the _Corpus inscriptionum latinarum,_ conceived and carried out by a historian endowed with the passionate energy and the synthetic mind of a Mommsen. In the eighteenth century (with one or two very rare and partial exceptions) historians disdained parchment and in-folios, or opened them impatiently, _bibentes et fugientes_ but in the nineteenth century no serious spirit dared to affirm any longer that it was possible to compose history without accurate, scrupulous, meticulous study of the documents upon which it is to be founded.