cal literature under the guidance of Lanfranc, Anselm, Gratian, and Irnerius, and a famous but now almost forgotten Englishman, John of Salisbury. Flourishing schools were founded at Bec and Chartres, at Monte Casino and Salerno; and from this period we may date the beginning of the great Universities, Bologna, Paris, Oxford. At each of these places there were schools of immemorial antiquity, but it was at this time that they acquired corporate rights and independent self-government. "Universitas" means a corporation. The revival of classical literature was partly a symptom and partly a cause of a great and general insurrection against Papal authority and ecclesiastical prescription, which, led by Abelard and Arnold of Brescia, seemed at one time likely to antedate the Reformation by nearly four centuries. Heresy was rife in all the schools; the most polite of the provinces of France, Languedoc, was in the power of the Albigenses; democratic principles were maintained in every city of Italy, and a Republic was established in Rome itself. But the hour was not yet come. The weight of custom, authority, and tradition, was too strong for the newly awakened forces to move. The old crust of the volcano heaved but did not break, and the imprisoned Titans had to bide their time. Abelard was silenced, and Arnold was hanged; the Roman republic was suppressed by Adrian IV., and the Albigenses of Languedoc were exterminated by fire and sword in the crusade headed by Simon de Montfort. The vigorous repression of these new heresies in politics and religion was the chief object of the pontificate of Innocent III., perhaps the greatest man who ever filled the papal throne. His reign, from 1198 to 1216, was almost coincident with that of John of England. His task was facilitated by the internal distractions of the great European kingdoms, whose subjects were disposed, by their longing for peace, to welcome an arbitrator who assumed to speak in the name of the Prince of Peace, and by the lassitude and weariness which supervenes upon every intellectual effort, especially when it is premature. But his work was most powerfully assisted by two men, Dominic, born at Calaroga, in Castile, in 1170, and Francis, born at Assisi in 1182. These men were to the mediæval Church of Rome what Ignatius NEW SERIES.-VOL. XVI., No. 3. Loyola was to that Church after the shock of the Reformation-its renovators and preservers. The founder of the Dominicans and the founder of the Franciscans, differing in character, were at one in their faith and zeal, and worked in converging lines toward the same end.* Dominic, the eloquent preacher, the relentless persecutor, the virtual if not the actual founder of the Inquisition, whose life was one long aggressive warfare-Francis, the devout and tender mystic, whose life was one long, self-inflicted martyrdom-were agreed in denouncing the wealth and luxury, and worldliness and secular learning, of the monks and the clergy. The Church, they said, wholly absorbed in material interest, had left the people hungering for spiritual food; hence the success of the heretical Peter Waldo and his missionaries. The Mendicant Friars caught up the weapons of the heretics, and wielded them in the service of the Church. A few years after their first foundation, there was scarcely a city in Christendom which had not at least one convent of Friars, Preachers, or Minorites. Papal authority sanctioned the fanaticism which it could not control. All over Europe there was a strange outbreak of superstition and fanaticism, of which the successful preaching of the Dominicans and Franciscans was partly a symptom and partly a cause. In the belief of men Heaven had again bent itself to earth. The miracles of Dominic and Francis, at tested by eye-witnesses, rivaled (as their followers boasted) the miracles of Christ himself. Seventy years later, when faith had begun to cool, it was again warmed to fervor by the most signal of all miracles. The house of the Virgin was transported by angels from Palestine to Loreto. No one doubted a fact which was vouched for by competent witnesses, and solemnly affirmed by the Pope. In England the new Saint Thomas of Canterbury had come to be regarded as more powerful than our Lady of Walsingham herself. At this time, too, religious zeal, combined with love of adventure, impelled the noblest of the European youths to join successive Crusades, whence, for the most part, they never returned. Wave after wave they foamed themselves away upon the barren Asian shore, one of the saddest examples of the wasted power and misdirected energy which hindered human progress in the Middle Ages; and not in the Middle Ages alone. While the apostles of ignorance and obscurantism found a congenial audience in every village and hamlet, they attacked the strongholds of learning and free thought, the Universities, by a different method. They drove Truth back to her old cavern, and piled mountains of casuistry upon its mouth. The youthful intellect was diverted from any path which might have led elsewhere than to Rome, by entangling it in the mazes of an endless labyrinth. The Dominican Schoolmen, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, the Franciscans, Duns Scotus* and Bonaventura, devoted an energy and industry almost superhuman to the construction of elaborate systems of dialectic, proving as a foregone conclusion the orthodox creed on all subjects of human knowledge contained in the sentences of Peter the Lombard. One or other of these systems, or rather the great system of which these were but varieties, triumphed in every university. No wonder that classical learning, which had begun to revive in the two preceding centuries, declined in the thirteenth. I believe that the MSS. of classical Latin au thors transcribed in the thirteenth century are much rarer than those of the eleventh or twelfth. Many MSS. of ancient authors were doubtless obliterated then, in order to write on the parchment some treatise of the prevailing scholastic divinity. Nor was it learning alone that was oppressed. All original speculation in philosophy, all original research in science, was sternly prohibited. For this offence Roger Bacon, who unhappily in his youth had been seduced to take the Franciscan garb, was thrown into prison, and released only to die. It is impossible to estimate how much has been lost to mankind, how long the progress of mankind has been retarded by this diversion of its intellect to a barren and profitless task. What humanity lost, priestcraft gained; a few more centuries of unavenged tyranny and undetected imposture. The spiritual revival, however, produced by the preaching of the friars, was but a fire of straw; the ardent fanaticism which they had kindled sunk into cold indiffer Duns Scotus, who died in 1308, is not mentioned by Dante. Albert, Thomas, and Bonaventura, (of whom the two last died in 1274,) are among the chief saints in heaven. (Par., xiii.) ence-a feeling not distasteful to the magnates of the Church, whose pomp and magnificence were tacitly rebuked by the poverty of their humblest servants. And soon,* over the Mendicant orders themselves, came the inevitable change. To them, as to the first brethren of the older orders, reputation for sanctity brought gifts and donations; worldly possessions produced a worldly spirit. The churches and convents of the Dominicans and Franciscans soon rivaled in splendor those of the Benedictines and Augustinians, and the apostolic missionary degenerated into the lazy monk or the sturdy beggar. The infant literature in the vulgar tongue of each nation is filled with satires upon the friars, showing how odious they had become to all except the lowest of the people. Many a popular song rings the changes in a ruder form upon the famous burden "What baron or squire, or knight of the shire, Lives half so well as a jovial friar ?" An attempt to revive the principles and practice of St. Francis produced a dissenting sect of friars, the so-called Fraticelli, who instead of being, like the first Franciscans, the devoted servants of Rome, actually denounced the Pope Boniface VIII. as held as to the immediate reign of the Holy Anti-Christ, and, in the wild views they Ghost, anticipated the doctrines of the Fifth Monarchy men of the seventeenth century. And William of Ockham, himself a Franciscan, the greatest of English Schoolmen, dared to turn against the papal supremacy the very weapons of dialectic subtlety which had been invented to defend it. If his fame has been eclipsed by that of his follower, Wicliff, it is because the latter availed himself of a new and more powerful instrument, the native tongue, which in every country of Europe was henceforth to open the way to the hearts of the people. And this brings me to the first incontestDante-a theme infinitely interesting and ably great name in modern literature, dwell so far as it is germane to my subject, fascinating, but upon which I must only namely, to point out to what extent his mind was influenced by the recollections of classical antiquity. Dante, in the beginning of his great Roger Bacon, writing about the year 1257, says, "Novi ordines jam horribiliter labefactati sunt a pristina dignitate." poem, represents himself as meeting the shade of Virgil, whom he greets in the well-known lines: "Or sei tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte Che spande di parlar si largo fiume? O degla altri poeti onore e lume, Lo bello stilo che m' ha fatto onore." The primacy over all the Latin poets of antiquity which Dante here gives to Virgil, had been enjoyed by him throughout the whole of the Middle Ages. He was more copied, more quoted, and more read, than all the others put together. This pre-eminent fame he owed, in great measure to the fourth Eclogue, which, as I have already mentioned, was interpreted as a prophecy for the coming of Christ, and this won for his poems an exceptional favor among the most rigid theologians. Even Gregory the Great would have hesitated before condemning Virgil to the flames. The learned took him for a prophet, the vulgar for a magician. The custom of consulting the Sortes Virgilianæ about future events, began in something more than sport. Even Pope Innocent VI., (1352– 1362,) himself famed for his knowledge of the Canon Law, thought that Petrarch must be studying magic because he read Virgil (Petr. Epist. Rev. Senil. i. 3.) Next to Virgil, Dante knew Statius best, whom he represents as having been secretly baptized, and thus freed from the limbo where the other ancient poets dwelt, suffering the eternal punishment of desire without hope. First among these he places the sovereign poet, Homer, who, however was but a name to him, for there was then no Latin translation extant. Next to Homer comes "the satirist Horace."* Ovid is the third, and the last Lucan. He refers elsewhere to the Metamorphoses and the Pharsalia. In the 22d canto of the "Purgatorio," he mentions, as dwelling with Homer, Terence, Cæcilius, Plautus, Varro, Juvenal, Persius; and of the Greeks, Euripides, Anacreon, Simonides, and Agathon, a tragic poet of the second rank, also mentioned by Chaucer, and known in the Middle Ages because he had been quoted in the Ethics, Rhetoric, and Poetics of * Does this phrase imply that Horace's Odes were unknown to Dante? Aristotle. Pindar, Hesiod, Eschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Theocritus, are not named; nor of the Roman poets, Lucretius, Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, or Martial. Apart from the poets, are a motley group of philosophers, Greek, Latin, and Arabian, gathered round their sovereign, Aristotle, "il maestro di color che sanno." Next to him, in front of all the rest, are Socrates and Plato. It is worthy of note that Petrarch, in the next age, assigned the first place to Plato, and the second to Aristotle, thus making a direct advance in the knowledge of Greek philosophy. In Dante's mind Aristotle was the master of Plato. Seneca is mentioned, and Cicero, strangely placed between Orpheus and Li nus. He nowhere names Sallust, or either Pliny or Tacitus. Of Greek he knew nothing, and, with the single exception of Aristotle, no ancient Greek author had in his time been made accessible in a Latin version. In Latin his reading had been more varied than select or critical. In an Italian work, the "Convito," he mentions, as the best prose writers whom he knew, Livy, Cicero, Frontinus, and Paulus Orosius-a strange medley. His own Latin style is what we should expect from this judg ment. It is the flowing, facile Latin which was the common language of educated men, Churchmen, and Schoolmen all over the world, contemptuously nick-named by the scholars of later days "Dog Latin." Happily for the world, since it was in the enforced leisure of exile that he wrote his great poem, but, unhappily for himself, Dante's life fell upon evil days, when Italy was split up into a multitude of petty states, and each state torn by factions-Neri and Bianchi, Guelfs and Ghibellines. Dante became a Ghibelline, because he looked upon the restoration of the old Roman empire, in the person of a Teutonic sovreign, as the only possible salvation of his distracted country. The empire of the Cæsars, as he conceived it to have been— strong to enforce peace, repress faction, and punish crime was his ideal. Hence it is that, in the deepest depth of Hell,. those he had ever devised for the blackest suffering tortures worse than the worst of guilt, he places Brutus and Cassius, the with Judas, the betrayer of Christ. In his murderers of the first Cæsar, side by sidetreatise, "De Monarchia," (which alonewith the Divine Comedy, is mentioned in the epitaph on his tomb, said to have been written, in anticipation of death, by himself,) he claims for the Emperor, as successor of the Cæsars, unbounded temporal authority, leaving to the Pope unbounded spiritual authority as the vicegerent of Christ. He quotes Livy and Lucan to prove that God wrought special miracles in the founding of the Roman empire, and cites, with as much reverence as if it were a text of Holy Writ, the famous line of Virgil: "Tu regere imperio populus, Romane, memento." Dante's life of disappointment closed in 1321, when the prospect of a restoration of peace in Italy, under a strong central authority, such as he had dreamed of, seemed further removed than ever; when the supreme power, or rather the shadow of supreme power, was divided between a Pope who had removed for security to Avignon, and an Emperor who was not strong enough to force his way to Rome. Petrarch was born in 1304, seventeen years before the death of Dante. The two men whose names were to be associated for ever as the fathers of Italian poetry, never met in life. Petrarch's parents were Florentines, of the Ghibelline faction, and were living in poverty and exile at Arezzo, when their son was born. When he was eight years old they removed to Avignon, then the residence of the Popes; and there, for the best part of his life, he resided, in the city or the neighboring Vaucluse, hard by the fountain of Sorgia, which his genius has made as famous as Horace's fountain of Bandusia, and which, like it, is annually for his sake visited by pilgrims from all parts of the world. His name dwells in the affectionate remembrance of men because of the exquisite poems which he wrote on the life and death of the lady whom he called Madonna Laura. I have to speak of him here as a man of learning, yet I can not forbear to glance for a moment at the more captivating phase of his life, "the love which never saw its earthly close," a theme which has been to many a poet the source of his purest and most powerful inspiration. In the Romances of Chivalry, every hero devotes himself to the service of some fair lady, who, by the gift of a glove or a knot of ribbon, or by an approving smile, amply rewards him for all that he has done, or suffered, in single combat, in battle, or in tournament, for her sake. After the pattern of these romances, the young knight fashioned his life. Don Quixote with his Dulcinea was only ridiculous because he came too late, when the old order had changed and given place to the new.* The Madonna in heaven, the type of all womanly beauty and purity, must needs have her counterpart on earth. This ideal love did not in the least clash with the love a man bore to his wife, the mother of his children. Dante saw his Beatrice for the first time at a children's party, when he was nine and she eight years old. He rested content with the memory of her golden hair and mild angelic eyes. When they grew up, he married somebody else, and she married somebody else. The real Beatrice on earth was but a passing fancy; the object of his perpetual adoration was the ideal Beatrice who guided Petrarch saw him through Paradise. Laura in church and fell in love, not with the lady, but with her image, as it dwelt in his mind. One of his biogra phers tells us that when all Avignon was ringing with the sonnets he wrote in her praise, the Pope offered to make him rich with ecclesiastical benefices, and a dispensation to marry, but the poet refused, because he could not write verses about his wife. That passion, indeed, can not be very deeply seated, whose outbreaks admit of being parceled into fourteen lines each, nor can that mind be much disturb ed which is capable of an endless play of fancy and the combination of intricate rhymes. The poet is like the actor, who, if he really felt the emotions he portrays, could not portray them half so well, and who must be master of himself if he would be master of his audience. Of these poems Petrarch, in after days, speaks thus contemptuously —" Vulgaria illa juvenilium laborum meorum cantica, quorum hodie pudet ac pœnitet." It was upon his Latin works in prose and verse that he built his hopes of eternal renown. When at the age of thirty-seven he was crowned as Laureate in the Capitol of Rome, it was rather, as I gather from his chivalry away," is founded on a misconception. *The famous line, "Cervantes smiled Spain's He smiled Spain's chivalric romances away. The chivalry had gone long before. Vita, per Hier. Squarzafichum; Sig. 4, V. "was Benedict, who suc "The Pope," he says, ceeded Clement." The real order of succession is Clement V., John XXII., Benedict XII., (1334 1342,) Clement VI. own account, because of his Latin poems, his Bucolics and his unfinished epic Africa, than because of his poems in the vulgar tongue. It was as an imitator of Virgil that his fame had spread to Paris; it was his Africa that he submitted to the judgment of the accomplished King Robert at Naples. This was a special favor. The poet never, while he lived, allowed a copy to be taken. This affectation of mystery made the poem talked about all the more. Was Petrarch in this also deliberately imitating Virgil, who left the Æneid unfinished at his death? With Petrarch, Laura was but a transient fancy; learning a lifelong passion. His father had destined him for the law, but, like the "clerk foredoomed his father's soul to cross," he turned with loathing from the dry text-books of his profession, to study with ardent enthusiasm the ancient Roman orators and poets. So, when Walter Scott was supposed to be qualifying himself for an advocate in Edinburgh, his heart was with Thomas the Rhymer, or the moss-troopers of the Border. As Scott, when his genius had free scope, became the reviver of the Middle Ages, so Petrarch became the reviver of Roman antiquity. But the work of Scott affected only the fancy and the imagination; that of Petrarch gave the first impulse to a movement which changed the whole course of education, and finally revolutionized the creed of half Europe. And the movement has not spent its force yet. Petrarch tells us how his father one day detected him in the indulgence of his truant spirit, dragged his darling books one after another from their hiding-places, and threw them all on the fire, from which, relenting at the sight of his boy's tears, he rescued Virgil and Cicero's Rhetoric. It is to Petrarch's zeal, in all likelihood, that we owe the preservation of several of Cicero's half-forgotten works; among them the priceless" Epistolæ and Familiares." With this view he traveled first in France and then in Italy, diving into the dusty recesses of convent-libraries, and drawing thence treasures of ancient wisdom more precious than rubies. He instituted inquiries for the same end in England and Germany. His position as the acknowledged chief of literature, at once the most popular poet and most powerful critic of his time, caused his enmity to be feared and his friendship sought by Pope and Pe cardinals, by kings and nobles; and the most acceptable present which could be made to him was the gift of an old manuscript. Hence the library which he collected was probably for Latin classical literature the richest of its time. His fame, and its fame, reached even Constantinople. At that date, some of the learned men of the East knew Latin; none of the learned men of the West knew Greek. Petrarch himself had learned a little, but, as it would seem, very little. His teacher was a certain Barlaam, a native of Southern Italy, or, as it was anciently called, Magna Græcia, where some traces of the old language still lingered; first a monk of the order of St. Bazil, then Professor of Theology at Constantinople, and in 1339 sent by the Emperor Andronicus II. to Avignon, to treat with Pope Benedict XII. about the reunion of the two churches. When Petrarch made his acquaintance in 1342, he had renounced his Greek heresies and come a second time to Avignon, to solicit a bishopric, which he obtained through the intercession of the poet. trarch complains that he taught Barlaam more Latin than Barlaam taught him Greek, and when Barlaam obtained his suit the lessons came to an end; for the Bishop went away to look after the feeding, or possibly the shearing, of his flock. Through him Petrarch had entered into correspondence with a learned Greek of Constantinople, Nicholas Syoceros by name, who, in compliance with an earnest request, sent him a copy of Homer. Petrarch's delight was unbounded, or rather would have been unbounded if he had been able to read it. "Your Homer," he says, in his letter of thanks, dated "Milan, January 10," (the year not given,) "is dumb to me and I am deaf to him. I rejoice at the mere sight of him, and of ten I embrace him, and sighing say, 'O great poet, how I long to hear thy voice." " Petrarch died with this longing unsatisfied, but, as we shall see, the divine impulse was communicated to others and produced results of which he did not dream. There was then, as I have said, no Latin translation of Homer extant. One of the Iliad in hexameter verse, made in the time of the Empire, had long perished.* It Yet. Some fragments have been edited by L. Müller. Its reputed author is "Pindarus Thebanus"-an absurd pseudonym, or an absurd er ror. |