calm. Both were strong in the sense of wrong, injured men in their own opinion, bearing the weight of England's intolerance, and incapacity to understand the minds of poets. But both were so young, spendthrifts of God's gifts, with no time before them to think better of it, no escape into a purer day possible for either. And howsoever we may blame and judge-as judge we must-yet the gentle heaven judged not, but sent down its dews and star-rays softly through the enchanted twilight upon the two young beautiful poets' heads, upon the two wasted lives. God help them! Lives more forlorn, amid all their wealth. of nature and favoring circumstances, were never thrown away under those peaceful skies.

Byron never returned to England; he lived a disturbed and wayward life in Italy, now moving from one storied city to another, now lingering in unknown corners, doing little but indulge himself and his fancies, and writing much which it might have been as well he had not written. We will not attempt to discuss the productions of his later years, a task which neither space nor inclination encourages; except, indeed, the greatest of all his works, the real and most lasting foundation of his fame. The Manfreds and Cains were but exaggerations doubly exaggerated of his favorite conventionalism; but " Don Juan" is all real. To speak of this poem and of morality in the same breath is simple foolishness, and so must every attempt be to explain or justify its freedom. We believe that, as a mere question of art, the narrowness which limits a man's life to a series of continual indulgences in one favorite sin and varying expressions of one passion, is as narrow as the creed of the poorest precisian who ever was scoffed at by poet. Libertinism is as limited, as cramping and confining, as petty a kind of bondage, as any puritanism; and "passion," so called, has as little claim to be considered the grand spring of human movements, as any other of the manifold impulses which make or mar us. And at the same time no poem can take the highest rank of poetic excellence which confines itself to a certain audience, whatever that audience may be. Byron boasts that he will not make "ladies' books al dilettar le femine et la plebe ;" and this is a foolish vaunt, which we have heard repeated in our own day by various new poets, who NEW SERIES.-VOL. XVI., No. 4.

think it finer to write for a class than for humankind. But it ought to be understood by all capable minds that this is a very poor and false piece of bravado. Humankind, man and woman, small and great, is more worth writing for than any section of it, even were that section the most gifted, the most wise and great minds of their time. The whole is greater than a part; and he who chooses for himself a limited audience, ought at least to have the good sense to perceive that he is not bigger, but less in his aim, than other men -an amount of perception, however, with which we are not allowed to credit the poets who profess to produce strong meat for men and not milk for babes. Every such pretension is of its very nature an apology for littleness, little as it is intended so to be.

When we say this, we do not pretend to assert or to hope that in any but an ideal state of society it will be possible to maintain that poetry and morality must always go together. But we are confident in saying that few great poems, at least of those which have been written since Christianity began to affect the world, (though even this limitation is scarcely necessary,) are so interwoven with immoral situations and sentiments as to be inseparable from them, and to keep them continually before the reader. It is this characteristic which must always limit the fame of "Don Juan," a fault infinitely more serious than any amount of occasional aberrations into forbidden ways.

Yet with all its manifold defects there is an easy power and mastery in it, which, perhaps, more than any other poem of the time, gives to the reader the conception of strength and capacity almost unbounded. This, setting aside not only its morality, but its moral tone, (two quite distinct things,) and even setting aside the wonderful beauty of many passages, is the thing which strikes us most. The poet manages a measure by no means facile with the perfect ease of one to whom words are absolutely subject, and who can weave them as he likes, now splendidly, now fantastically, now with the most tragic, and now with the most trifling, meaning, but always with an invincible grace, facility, and lightness of touch, which fill the mind of the critic with a purely technical and professional admiration, in addition to the admiration which he must share with every lover of poetry. The

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melodiousness of the strain never glides, as it does in Shelley's hands, into mere music, dropping the thread of articulate thought; every thing is clear-every incident and detail, every vicissitude of the much-prolonged and lingering narrative. How it must have flowed forth, as natural, as easy as common talk, as spontaneousboundless so far as the writer's capacity went, limited only by intention and such poor human details as time and space, which keep the flood within inevitable channels! Even the occasional (and very occasional) jars in the verse give us a sense of careless force, never of poverty. That Byron did not take the trouble to alter here and there a defective line, seems part of the very freedom and ease and careless spontaneity of the strain. Thus it is strength, the sense of gigantic exertion without any strain of power, put forth as lightly as a child's play, yet as effectually as if the earth had been rent by the effort, which is the first great charm of the poem. With that hand so strong, so deft, so easy, so all-capable, what might not the poet do if he would? We are lost in admiration of his vast capacity, his smiling and careless power.

This is the first and greatest quality of "Don Juan." The exquisite passages with which the poem abounds, the absolute lucidity and distinctness of the narrative, and this sense of strength, and ease, and grace, and infinite capability, give to it a claim upon all who love and understand poetry. But when we have said this, we have stated only its real claims to greatness. It has another claim to another kind of greatness which has also been responded to largely, and which perhaps will continue to be responded to as long as men are such as they are. The figure of Don Juan himself carries out all we have said of the popularity of a vulgar and conventional ideal. Once more, we have the very climax and apotheosis of commonplace in this handsome young hero, made of coarse flesh and blood, washed over with just that lacker of outside refinement and sensibility which the vulgar love-who roams from love to love, and from adventure to adventure, always lucky, always safe to get clear of any scrape in which he finds himself. Such a personage is the incarnation of fine fancy to all commonplace and prosaic minds. Poor poet, who did not write books to delight the people!

It is at once his glory and his shame that he himself loved no other ideal than that which is the god of the plebe; and it is the plebe only-meaning thereby no social class, but those minds which, irrespective of rank, occupy the lowest imaginative level, and are content with the poorest ideal to whom his revelation was addressed. Cynicism is generally supposed to address itself to a more intellectual class; but the cynicism of "Don Juan" is exactly of the kind which delights the vulgar, and is their highest conception of superiority. This beautiful, daring, fortunate young hero goes about the world and sees the same weaknesses everywhere, and laughs. He is not ill-natured. On the contrary, he asks no better; he takes advantage of the imperfection of nature, and caresses her, and smiles, and goes on. They are all the same, high and low, old and young, he says with perfect complacency; he sees through them all, and does his best to please, and takes whatever he can get, and nods aside at the spectators. He has the ease, the grace, the strength of a god; and he has the soul of a costermonger. Heaven forgive us! there are virtuous costermongers as there are virtuous peers, and why we should thus stigmatize a class we know not. But this hero of poetry, this epic impersonation of man, is of the commonest and meanest mental type of humanity. His superiorities are all superficial; he is comprehensible through and through-there is neither depth, nor mystery, nor any secret in him that can confuse the vulgarest reader. And accordingly, the vulgar, the plebe whom the poet affected to despise-those who in ordinary cases stare and gape at poetryrose up and gave their coarse, unaccustomed hand to that other half of the world which prepares the thrones and pedestals of fame; and between them, while the song was still warm on his lips, this strange pair placed Byron on his pinnacle-an elevation half of real greatness, half of false fame-a place perhaps unparalleled in poetry, and entirely unique in England. Thus it was that, without pause or interval, Byron won every thing, in point of reputation, which the world has to give.

We need not linger upon the later portion of his life. It had a kind of love in its last chapter which gave him a kind of happiness-perhaps the only kind of love

and happiness of which he was capable. His death was like his life-a mixture of the real and the false, of tragedy and mock tragedy, of some genuine generosity and sentiment and a great deal of counterfeit. Amid the wild, confused, and bewildering melo-drama of Greek emancipation-amid strangers, with theatrical shouts in his ears, and operatic figures grouped about him, far away from any true affection or friend more trusted than an old servant-he died in the full flower of his days-Nel mezzo

del cammin di nostra vita. No more was granted to him, no time of reflection, no afternoon of thought. Never was life less happy, more forlorn and wasted, and never was end more pitiful. And thus all was ended upon earth for a man who had received every gift which Heaven could bestow upon a human creature-every gift except the one of knowing how to use the glorious faculties which God had put into his hands.

[From Blackwood's Magazine.

II.

I COMMENCE my second lecture with a passage from George Eliot's "Spanish Gipsy," which treats this portion of my subject with a fullness of detail, a conciseness and felicity of expression characteris

tic of the author.

"The fifteenth century since the Man Divine
Taught and was hated in Capernaum
Is near its end-is falling as a husk
Away from all the fruit its years have ripen'd.

Europe has come to her majority
And enters on the vast inheritance
Won from the tombs of mighty ancestors,
The seeds, the gold, the gems, the silent harps
That lay deep buried with the memories
Of old renown.

No more, as once in sunny Avignon,
The poet scholar spreads the Homeric page,
And gazes sadly, like the deaf at song;
For now the old epic voices ring again
And vibrate with the beat and melody
Stirred by the warmth of old Ionian days.
The martyr'd sage, the Attic orator
Immortally incarnate, like the gods,
In spiritual bodies, winged words
Holding a universe impalpable,
Find new audience. For evermore,

With grander resurrection than was feign'd
Of Attila's fierce Huns, the soul of Greece

Conquers the bulk of Persia. The maim'd

form

Quenching all wonder with Omnipotence,
Praising a name with indolent piety-
He spells the record of his long descent,
More largely conscious of the life that was."

In these stately lines the poet sums up the results which the great revival movement begun by Petrarch had accomplished a century after his death.

We must now descend to earth and go a hundred years backward, in order to trace the steps and point out the means by which these results were achieved. Florence was proud of Petrarch as her son. By honoring him she strove to make amends for the unkindness she had shown to Dante. Nowhere had he more fervent admirers, more devoted disciples.

Foremost among these was Boccaccio, author of the ever-to-be-remembered "Decamerone," and the ever-to-be-forgotten Genealogia Deorum." There is a saying attributed to the Emperor Charles V., that according as one knew so many languages he was so many times a man. Petrarch and Boccaccio spoke and wrote two languages with equal readiness. There were. two men in each. There was Petrarch, the Italian poet, graceful, tender, and (in Shakspeare's phrase) "high fantastical;" and Petrarch, the Latin moralist, stern, uncompromising, and aggressive. There was Boccaccio, the Italian novelist, by turns gay and pathetic, licentious and severe, but always inimitably simple and natural; and Boccaccio, the Latin pedant, laborious without method, indefatigable in research without. discrimination. In the living Boccaccio the two characters, so distinct in his books, were blended into one, and doubtless the Latin which he spoke in discussion with

his friends was lighted up with the graces of the "Decamerone." His relations with Petrarch were uninterruptedly friendly, always on the recognized footing of disciple and master. The homage of the disciple was graciously accepted; the condescending patronage of the master never gave offence. These two have supplied no chapter to "The Quarrels of Authors." It is true that they never lived in the same place. Distance is a great preserver of peace. Another disciple was Luigi Marsigli, an Augustinian monk of the convent of Santo Spirito, in Florence, who in early life had seen Petrarch himself, and been stimulated by his encouragement to the study of classical learning; a man of letters, a man of the world, an ardent patriot, who in spite of these disqualifications became Bishop of Florence. But that was at a later period, in 1389, fourteen years after Boccaccio's death. A third disciple was Coluccio de' Salutati, who wrote in Latin ethical treatises in imitation of those of Petrarch, and a poem on the wars of Pyrrhus in imitation of his " Africa." In April, 1375, eight months before Boccaccio's death, he was made clerk to the Priori of Florence, i.e., secretary of state for all departments. He held the office for thirty-one years, and from a servant became virtually prime minister of the Republic. He was the first who wrote dispatches with classical precision and elegance. So powerful and persuasive were they that one of the Visconti declared that Salutati's pen had done him more harm than a thousand Florentine spears. In the war between Florence and Pope Gregary XI. (1375-1378) he secured the sympathies of all Italy by denouncing the Breton mercenaries-the Papal Zouaves of five hundred years ago-whom the Holy Father had enlisted to kill, burn, and ravage in his cause. From this time forward every state held it indispensable to have an elegant Latinist for its secretary: and this helped to wrest the direction of public affairs out of the hands of the clergy. We all remember what services, nearly three centuries later, Milton in that capacity rendered to the government of Cromwell.

The three men I have mentioned, in conjunction with others of like mind, founded a society for mutual improvement and discussion, which they called the "Accademia," the model and precursor of many

similar societies, whose influence in the next century was incalculable. It was, in fact, the first "Literary and Philosophical Institution." It held its meetings at Santo Spirito, in Marsigli's chamber, or in the convent garden, according to the season and the weather. The very foundation of such a society was a portentous sign of the times. The thoughts of men were ripe for revolt, and here was the standard of revolt set up. The Church, which was supreme in all universities and schools, had hitherto controlled education and directed thought. The disobedience of Benedictine monks, whose only overt act was the transcription of some profane manuscript, had escaped notice in the secrecy of cloistered life; more public attempts at rebellion had been easily suppressed because they were isolated and premature; but now the hour was come, and the men. The Accademia which assembled at San Spirito was as much a dissenting meeting as the first gathering of Covenanters on the hill-side. Each was the symptom of a movement too strong to be put down by external pressure. Soon every city in Italy had its Academy founded upon the model of that at Florence. The questions proposed for debate were dry and abstract enough, with no apparent reference to politics or religion: the hostility to existing institutions and forms of thought, which was latent in the spirit and afterwards manifest in the effect of these academies, was at first unsuspected by the Church and perhaps by the members themselves. Intellectual power, prompted by enthusiasm, was now for the first time directed with sustained and organized effort toward an object which the church had not sanctioned. If we can picture to ourselves the impatient delight of the Neapolitan antiquaries as they watched the shoveling away of the volcanic dust which had covered Pompeii for seventeen centuries, and saw the ancient city rising house by house and street by street from its grave; or the reassured hopefulness of Columbus as he saw the floating sea-weed and the flights of strange birds, and knew that land was near; or the trembling eagerness of the alchemist, when at length he believed that he held in his crucible the potential gold— we may realize the ardent curiosity, stimulated from time to time by the pleasure of discovery, with which the Academicians investigated the treasures of that old world

which to them was new. And the treasures were then, literally, "untold." For us they have been thoroughly explored and sifted; they stand upon our shelves indexed, labeled, sorted; nor can we reasonably hope to add to their number. But it was other wise with the scholars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The diligent search which was now for the first time set on foot, brought to light first one and then another long lost volume, and every man might hope to immortalize his name by a like discovery. Urged by such a hope, Boccaccio, whose name has become immortal on other grounds, visited the convent of Monte Cassino and asked to see the famous library. "Go up stairs," said one of the brethren, "you will find it open." In fact, he found it unprotected even by a door. It was in a deplorable state: there were books without bindings, and, sadder still, bindings without books. For the book-worms of the convent had of late occupied themselves in erasing the ancient writing from the parchments and converting them into psalters, breviaries, and texts, worn as amulets, which were worth more -to sell.* In fact, since the establishment of the Mendicant orders, which had attracted to themselves all the more ardent and energetic men, the Benedictines had lost their old repute. The once busy hives were now filled with drones, who did nothing or did mischief. Sometimes there were wasps in the hive. In 1386, Peter Tartarus, Abbot of Monte Cassino, led a body of troops to besiege Pope Urban at Nocera, and was distinguished for the ingenuity with which he devised various tortures for his prisoners (Milman, Lat. Christ. bk. xiii. ch. 2.)

The revival movement was a thoroughly lay movement. It was begun independently of all existing organizations, ecclesiastical and scholastic, and it was carried forward in spite of their avowed hostility or sullen antipathy. Among the foremost promoters of the movement were the selfappointed professors, who wandered from city to city giving lectures on ancient Latin literature. Here again we trace the

A few days ago I spent two days in the convent of Monte Cassino. I found the library, or what remains of it, carefully guarded and well arranged. The librarian accounted for the missing books by saying that some of their Abbots, who had become Popes, had carried the chief treasures away to the Vatican.

immediate influence of Petrarch, for the first to set the example was Giovanni Malpaghino, usually called, from his birthplace, Giovanni de Ravenna, who had served for years as Petrarch's secretary, copying his letters, as Tiro copied those of Cicero, and had caught from him "the enthusiasm of the Humanities."

He took for his chief text-books Cicero and the Latin poets. With him, as with his old patron, knowledge of Greek was an aspiration not an acquisition. He lectured, with a success of which the achievements of his pupils are the best proof, in many Italian cities, and especially at Florence, the metropolis of the new learning. All ranks and all ages (but not, so far as I know, both sexes) crowded to hear him. The Princes of Ferrara induced him to settle there by the gift of an honorable office, but he wearied of the little court and the dull life, and resumed his old wandering habits. Among the list of his scholars we find many names of men afterwards distinguished for their enlightened patronage or diligent prosecution of literature, such as Palla degli Strozzi, Roberto dei Rossi, Lionardo Bruno, Poggio Bracciolini, Vittorino of Feltre, Guarino, and Traversari. Many followed his example and became itinerant lecturers, meeting everywhere honorable welcome and receiving substantial reward. In reading of these men we are reminded of the Greek philosophers and rhetoricians who in the fifth century B.C. went from city to city, finding everywhere audiences eager to listen, and willing to pay. In both cases, though by very different means, the tendency of the lecturers' teaching was hostile to received opinions and creeds. Nor is this the only point of resemblance. A very elaborate parallel might be drawn between the republics of ancient Greece and those of medieval Italy. At a later period, when Greek antiquities began to be known as well as Latin, the Florentine scholars discovered the resemblance of their own city to Athens, and endeavored to heighten that resemblance by deliberate imitation.

It was impossible for the enthusiastic worshipers of ancient Latin literature to remain content with it. Every page of their favorite authors reminded them that there was a literature still more venerable, derived from an antiquity still more remote, the literature of Greece. The subject-matter of all the Roman philosophers, the