endeavoring to free thyself from the fetters of clerical domination.

Shake off the prejudices of superstition, become a man first, and an Irishman afterwards. Then it will be that by thy free, intelligent, and energetic association with other men, by whatever name they may be called-English, American, or French -thy country will be restored to thee in one universal fatherland.

Learn the true significance of solidarity. In hoc signo vinces. This is the first article in our creed. Labor as a member of the great universal family. Thy nearest neighbor, England, will be the first who will stretch out her hand and make the Irish Question her own.

Until then it is in vain that, like a squir

rel in a cage, thou turnest to and fro in thy insurrections, without any chance of escape. Above all, it is thy love of strong drink that makes thee poor; in it thy poor head and thy country also are alike drowned.

My decided opinion may be summed up in one word-the alliance of Ireland with England on one common platform; the enfranchisement of both by one common bond of brotherhood.

So long as the people of England and Ireland shall stand looking upon each other like two dogs ready to fly at each other, the English aristocracy will despise both. one and the other, will rub their hands and laugh at both.

[From Fraser's Magazine.

I.

TOWARD the close of the fifth century of our era the Roman Empire of the West formally came to an end by the resignation of the puppet-monarch who, by a strange irony of fate, bore the name of Romulus. A certain number, or rather an uncertain number, of centuries which followed, are known in history as "the Middle Ages." Such designations, necessary though they be, are apt to be misleading unless we bear in mind that they are merely conventional terms, adopted for the convenience of the historian, who must mark out his portion of the boundless field, and fix somewhere his point of departure and his goal. But in using them, we must remember that there are, in fact, no breaks in the long chain of cause and effect; no pauses in the activity of man, any more than in that of nature; no cataclysm and re-creation, but endless evolution; old forms decaying and new forms growing, in obedience to laws which the faith of Science holds to be eternal and immutable, like their Divine Author, even though the complexity of the phenomena may baffle her efforts to classify them and refer them to their causes. The hidden forces which

wrought during the Middle Ages, silently and gradually changing the life, the lan

* Two Lectures delivered before the Edinburgh

Literary and Philosophical Institution.

guage, and religion of the nations of Western Europe, had been as actively at work for centuries before, undermining and corrupting the whole system, political, social, and religious, of Imperial Rome; and the fall of the last Augustus was an event only important as furnishing a convenient epoch for the conclusion or the beginning of the historian's survey. It is not so easy to agree upon an epoch at which the Middle Ages may be supposed to cease. It may be convenient, with some writers, to fix upon the year 1400, which has the advantage of being a round number, and therefore easily remembered. If we want a date which has a more serious justification, we must first inquire what great event, or events, had the most influence in turning the thoughts and energies of men into new channels, and in remoulding their social and political life after a new pattern. Shall we say the revival of classical literature and art? or the growth of a national literature among the several nations of the West? or the destruction of feudalism? or the change in warfare brought about by the use of artillery? or the invention of printing? or the discovery of America? or the Reformation? It is obvious that

the historian would choose by preference one or other of these events as the point of contrary flexure, marking the end of the medieval and the beginning of the modern world, in reference to his own special

not only in art, but in politics and religion, is to deny the great consoling doctrine of human progress proclaimed by the poet : "Yet, I doubt not, through the ages one increas. ing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns."

Even in the darkest period of the dark ages the light of ancient literature and ancient civilization was never wholly extinguished. Successive hordes of barbarians first wasted and ravaged and held to ransom, then conquered and settled in Italy, France, and Spain, but they ended by learning the language and adopting the manners of the conquered. In Britain, indeed, the Angles and Saxons swept away all trace of Roman culture, but then in all likelihood Britain had never been so completely romanized as France or Spain, and its invaders bore a far larger proportion to the native inhabitants. In Italy, France, and Spain, the conquerors, chiefly of Teutonic origin, like those of Britain, and belonging to a race naturally tenacious of old customs, were forced by their paucity of numbers to learn the language of their subjects, into which they imported their own vocabulary so far as it concerned war and the chase. But while they learned the Latin language, nothing could make them learn the Latin grammar. The cases of nouns and the declensions of verbs were in great part lost, and the result was a debased jargon, available for the ordinary intercourse of daily life, but scorned by all who had any pretensions to learning, and held to be utterly unfit to be a vehicle of accurate reasoning or lofty eloquence. Centuries were to elapse before these vulgar tongues shaped themselves into Italian, French, and Spanish, each having its own special forms, and each becoming the vehicle of a literature stamped with the characteristic genius of the people.

But side by side with this popular language, a more classical Latin maintained its ground, chiefly by the influence of the Church. The rich and varied ritual, the authorized version of the Holy Scriptures, and the voluminous works of the Western Fathers, were all in Latin, which if not pure, according to the standard of Cicero or Quintilian, yet observed in the main the old rules of grammar and syntax. Latin was the language of the Church, which never lost its hold on the Roman prov

inces of the Western continent, which speedily reconquered Britain, and by and by extended its sway far beyond the limits of the ancient empire. Besides this, the Roman civil law, the noblest and most enduring monument of ancient genius, continued to maintain itself as the rule of civic life and the bond of social order. Here and there, if temporarily abolished by violence and compelled to yield to the customary law of barbarian conquerors, it re-asserted its claims, proved its rights to rule men by its reasonableness and its completeness, and has been the basis on which every legislator of the continent has founded his code, from Theodosius to Napoleon. Every one who studied law must needs acquaint himself with Latin, and that not superficially but accurately, so as to discriminate between the meanings and shades of meaning which each word bears according to its context. Again, all sacred and all profane literature in Western Europe was written in Latin. And the amount was enormous. If any one will take the trouble to glance over the footnotes and the indices to Gibbon's Decline and Fall, or Milman's History of Latin Christianity, he may convince himself that even in the darkest and most troubled times there was no century, scarcely a decade, which did not contribute some work still extant to theology, philosophy, or history. These works may now be obsolete and unreadable; but to become obsolete and unreadable is the lot of all, except the happy few in whom genius is combined with a favorable opportunity and good fortune. They prove at all events that learning was never extinct, because the authors wrote in a language very different from their mother-tongue.

Not only the laws and language, but many other traditions of the old Empire, survived its fall. Cities continued to be governed by the old municipal regulations; the "potestas," or magistrate, remained in the "podestà ;" and the petty princes who seized upon separate provinces, sought for a kind of sanction for their usurpations by taking the titles of Duke, Count or Viscount, which the later Emperors had granted to the officers who exercised authority in their name.

Amid the incessant wars, restrictions and vexations, which the division into small principalities brought upon the people,

pagan literature, and is said to have scattered to the winds what remained of the Palatine library founded by Augustus. In the eyes of the devout Churchman the gods of the heathen were evil demons, and the heathen books which recognized their divinity were to be consigned to the flames as impious and heretical.

And yet it is to the Church, though in the Church's despite, that we owe the preservation of these ancient authors. This is a paradox, but it is undoubtedly true: and it came about through the influence of the monastic orders.

Monasticism is not a product of Christianity. Before the time of Christ in Syria and Palestine and Egypt there were monks and hermits, both communities of Coenobites and solitary Anchorites, who had retired into the desert, to escape from the temptations of the world, to devote their lives to prayer and fasting, and, by humbling the intellect and conquering the passions, to merit an eternity of reward. If the example of Christ, who found temptation in the wilderness and His field of action among the haunts of men, was opposed to such a course, many isolated texts of the Old and New Testaments might seem to sanction it. It was at Patmos, not at Ephesus, that the Apocalypse was vouchsafed to St. John. The monastic life, which in the earliest ages of Christianity spread widely in the East, was enforced in the West by the authority of Athanasius and the example of Jerome. A more powerful impulse still was given to the system by St. Benedict, born at Nursia in 480, who founded first the monastery of Subiaco and then that of Monte Casino, which to this day the traveler from Rome to Naples sees two thousand feet above him, like a little city along the mountain ridge. The rule of St. Benedict, which rigidly parceled out each day between religious worship and manual labor, left no room for profane studies. But gradually the rule was relaxed; pious donations and bequests poured wealth upon the monks; the humble sheds which had sheltered the earliest brethren expanded into the magnificent monastery with its church, refectory, guest-chamber, and a palace for its Abbot. The monks, now lords of wide domains, performed their manual labors by deputy, and amused their leisure with literary pursuits, reading, copying, and collating manuscripts, among which the pro

scribed works of pagan authors found a place-furtively, it is true, and under protest, but thus acquiring the additional flavor of forbidden fruit.

Again and again reformers arose-Benedict of Aniane, Odilo of Cluny, Gualberto of Vallombrosa, Hildebrand, (afterward Pope Gregory VII.,) Hugh of Cluny, Stephen Harding of Citeau, and Bernard of Clairvaux-who endeavored to restore the rigid discipline of the founder of the order. But there is a saying of Horace which has grown into a proverb, "Drive nature out with a pitchfork, still she will come back." Precisely what had happened at Monte Casino happened at Cluny, Citeaux, Clairvaux, and Fountains, and the Benedictine writers by their numerous quotations seem to have been proud of the learning thus surreptitiously acquired. Among the rules of the Abbey of Cluny, where silence was enforced, or supposed to be enforced, there is a code of signs by which the monks were to make their wants known. If one wanted a book from the library, he was to make a motion with his hand as if turning over the leaves. There were special signs to indicate that he wanted a missal or a psalter, or a theological treatise; but if he wanted a profane work written by a pagan, he was to scratch his ear like a dog, “quia nec immerito infideles tali animanti comparan

This may remind us how St. Jerome in his retreat at Bethlehem endeavored to cure his mind of its hankering after classical literature by submitting his body to repeated flagellations, the very method which in our public schools is applied, quite as ineffectually, for the opposite purpose.

There was not a single monastic order which did not speedily lapse from the austerity of its founder's rule. The disobedience and worldliness of the Benedictines especially took the noble form of a devotion to literature. In spite of St. Benedict and St. Bernard, the brethren of the Benedictine convents vied with each other in the formation of splendid libraries, of which that of Monte Casino remains to this day, not indeed intact, but still rich in treasures both sacred and profane. And the French Benedictines have preserved even to our own times the noble tradition of their order.

The eleventh and twelfth centuries were marked by a great revival of Latin classi