In Europe we are slenderly supplied with historians, and with
narratives exhibiting the manners and peculiarities of successive
races of men, from the time of Theodosius in the close of the fourth
century of the Christian era to the end of the tenth. Mankind during
that period were in an uncommon degree wrapped up in ignorance and
barbarism. We may be morally sure that this was an interval beyond all
others, in which superstition and an implicit faith in supernatural
phenomena predominated over this portion of the globe. The laws of
nature, and the everlasting chain of antecedents and consequents, were
little recognised. In proportion as illumination and science have
risen on the world, men have become aware that the succession of
events is universally operating, and that the frame of men and animals
is every where the same, modified only by causes not less unchangeable
in their influence than the internal constitution of the frame itself.
We have learned to explain much; we are able to predict and investigate
the course of things; and the contemplative and the wise are not less
intimately and profoundly persuaded that the process of natural events
is sure and simple and void of all just occasion for surprise and the
lifting up of hands in astonishment, where we are not yet familiarly
acquainted with the developement of the elements of things, as where
we are. What we have not yet mastered, we feel confidently persuaded
that the investigators that come after us will reduce to rules not
less obvious, familiar and comprehensible, than is to us the rising of
the sun, or the progress of animal and vegetable life from the first
bud and seed of existence to the last stage of decrepitude and decay.
But in these ages of ignorance, when but few, and those only the most
obvious, laws of nature were acknowledged, every event that was not of
almost daily occurrence, was contemplated with more or less of awe and
alarm. These men "saw God in clouds, and heard him in the wind."
Instead of having regard only to that universal Providence, which acts
not by partial impulses, but by general laws, they beheld, as they
conceived, the immediate hand of the Creator, or rather, upon most
occasions, of some invisible intelligence, sometimes beneficent, but
perhaps oftener malignant and capricious, interfering, to baffle the
foresight of the sage, to humble the pride of the intelligent, and to
place the discernment of the most gifted upon a level with the
drivellings of the idiot, and the ravings of the insane.
And, as in events men saw perpetually the supernatural and miraculous,
so in their fellow-creatures they continually sought, and therefore
frequently imagined that they found, a gifted race, that had command
over the elements, held commerce with the invisible world, and could
produce the most stupendous and terrific effects. In man, as we now
behold him, we can ascertain his nature, the strength and pliability
of his limbs, the accuracy of his eye, the extent of his intellectual
acquisitions, and the subtlety of his powers of thought, and can
therefore in a great measure anticipate what we have to hope or to
fear from him. Every thing is regulated by what we call natural means.
But, in the times I speak of, all was mysterious: the powers of men
were subject to no recognised laws: and therefore nothing that
imagination could suggest, exceeded the bounds of credibility. Some
men were supposed to be so rarely endowed that "a thousand liveried
angels" waited on them invisibly, to execute their behests for the
benefit of those they favoured; while, much oftener, the perverse and
crookedly disposed, who delighted in mischief, would bring on those to
whom, for whatever capricious reason, they were hostile, calamities,
which no sagacity could predict, and no merely human power could
baffle and resist.
After the tenth century enough of credulity remained, to display in
glaring colours the aberrations of the human mind, and to furnish
forth tales which will supply abundant matter for the remainder of
this volume. But previously to this period, we may be morally sure,
reigned most eminently the sabbath of magic and sorcery, when nothing
was too wild, and remote from the reality of things, not to meet with
an eager welcome, when terror and astonishment united themselves with
a nameless delight, and the auditor was alarmed even to a sort of
madness, at the same time that he greedily demanded an ever-fresh
supply of congenial aliment. The more the known laws of the universe
and the natural possibility of things were violated, with the stronger
marks of approbation was the tale received: while the dextrous
impostor, aware of the temper of his age, and knowing how most
completely to blindfold and lead astray his prepared dupes, made a
rich harvest of the folly of his contemporaries. But I am wrong to
call him an impostor. He imposed upon himself, no less than on the
gaping crowd. His discourses, even in the act of being pronounced, won
upon his own ear; and the dexterity with which he baffled the
observation of others, bewildered his ready sense, and filled him with
astonishment at the magnitude of his achievements. The accomplished
adventurer was always ready to regard himself rather as a sublime
being endowed with great and stupendous attributes, than as a pitiful
trickster. He became the God of his own idolatry, and stood astonished,
as the witch of Endor in the English Bible is represented to have done,
at the success of his incantations.
But all these things are passed away, and are buried in the gulf of
oblivion. A thousand tales, each more wonderful than the other, marked
the year as it glided away. Every valley had its fairies; and every
hill its giants. No solitary dwelling, unpeopled with human
inhabitants, was without its ghosts; and no church-yard in the absence
of day-light could be crossed with impunity. The gifted enchanter
"bedimmed
The noon-tide sun, willed forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war; to the dread, rattling thunder
He gave forth fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt, the strong-based promontory
He made to shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar."
It is but a small remnant of these marvellous adventures that has been
preserved. The greater part of them are swallowed up in that gulf of
oblivion, to which are successively consigned after a brief interval
all events as they occur, except so far as their memory is preserved
through the medium of writing and records. From the eleventh century
commences a stream of historical relation, which since that time never
entirely eludes the search of the diligent enquirer. Before this
period there occasionally appears an historian or miscellaneous writer:
but he seems to start up by chance; the eddy presently closes over him,
and all is again impenetrable darkness.
When this succession of writers began, they were unavoidably induced
to look back upon the ages that had preceded them, and to collect here
and there from tradition any thing that appeared especially worthy of
notice. Of course any information they could glean was wild and
uncertain, deeply stamped with the credulity and wonder of an ignorant
period, and still increasing in marvellousness and absurdity from
every hand it passed through, and from every tongue which repeated it.