nature must be gradual. I have a suspicion, that sexual respect,
though not with all the refinements of chivalry, might be traced
earlier in the south of Europe than the tenth century; but it would
require a long investigation to prove this.
A passage, often quoted, of Radulphus Glaber, on the affected and
effeminate manners, as he thought them, of the southern nobility
who came in the train of Constance, daughter of the Count of
Toulouse, on her marriage with Robert, king of France, in 999,
indicates that the roughness of the Teutonic character, as well
perhaps as some of its virtues, had yielded to the arts and
amusements of peace. It became a sort of proverb; Franci ad bella,
Provinciales ad victualia. Eichhorn, Allg. Gesch. i. Append. 73.
The social history of the tenth and eleventh centuries is not
easily recovered. We must judge from probabilities founded on
single passages, and on the general tone of civil history. The
kingdom of Arles was more tranquil than the rest of France.
[300] Von eigentlicher galanterie ist in dem nibelungen Lied wenig zu
finden, von Christlichen mysticismus fast gar nichts. Bouterwek,
ix. 147. I may observe that the positions in the text, as to the
absence of gallantry in the old Teutonic poetry, are borne out by
every other authority; by Weber, Price, Turner, and Eichhorn. The
last writer draws rather an amusing inference as to the want of
politeness towards the fair sex from the frequency of abductions in
Teutonic and Scandinavian story, which he enumerates. Allg. Gesch.
i. 37. Append. p. 37.
[301] See, in Mr. Turner’s Hist. of England, iv. 256-269, two
dissertations on the romantic histories of Turpin and of Geoffrey,
wherein the relation between the two, and the motives with which
each was written, seem irrefragably demonstrated.
|Romances of chivalry, of two kinds.|
57. The condition and the opinions of a people stamp a character on its
literature; while that literature powerfully reacts upon and moulds
afresh the national temper from which it has taken its distinctive type.
This is remarkably applicable to the romances of chivalry. Some have
even believed, that chivalry itself, in the fulness of proportion
ascribed to it by these works, had never existence beyond their pages;
others, with more probability, that it was heightened and preserved by
their influence upon a state of society which had given them birth. A
considerable difference is perceived between the metrical romances,
contemporaneous with or shortly subsequent to the crusades, and those in
prose after the middle of the fourteenth century. The former are more
fierce, more warlike, more full of abhorrence of infidels; they display
less of punctilious courtesy, less of submissive deference to woman,
less of absorbing and passionate love, less of voluptuousness and
luxury; their superstition has more of interior belief, and less
of ornamental machinery, than those to which Amadis de Gaul and other
heroes of the later cycles of romance furnished a model. The one
reflect, in a tolerably faithful mirror, the rough customs of the feudal
aristocracy in their original freedom, but partially modified by the
gallant and courteous bearing of France; the others represent to us,
with more of licensed deviation from reality, the softened features of
society, in the decline of the feudal system through the cessation of
intestine war, the increase of wealth and luxury, and the silent growth
of female ascendency. This last again was, no doubt, promoted by the
tone given to manners through romance; the language of respect became
that of gallantry; the sympathy of mankind was directed towards the
success of love; and, perhaps, it was thought, that the sacrifices which
this laxity of moral opinion cost the less prudent of the fair, were but
the price of the homage that the whole sex obtained.
|Effect of difference of religion upon poetry.|
58. Nothing, however, more showed a contrast between the old and the new
trains of sentiment in points of taste than the difference of religion.
It would be untrue to say, that ancient poetry is entirely wanting in
exalted notions of the Deity; but they are rare in comparison with those
which the Christian religion has inspired into very inferior minds, and
which, with more or less purity, pervaded the vernacular poetry of
Europe. They were obscured in both by an enormous superstructure of
mythological machinery; but so different in names and associations,
though not always in spirit, or even in circumstances, that those who
delighted in the fables of Ovid usually scorned the Golden Legend of
James de Voragine, whose pages were turned over with equal pleasure by a
credulous multitude, little able to understand why any one should relish
heathen stories which he did not believe. The modern mythology, if we
may include in it the saints and devils, as well as the fairy and goblin
armies, which had been retained in service since the days of paganism,
is so much more copious, and so much more easily adapted to our ordinary
associations than the ancient, that this has given an advantage to the
romantic school in their contention, which they have well known how to
employ and to abuse.
|General tone of romance.|
59. Upon these three columns,--chivalry, gallantry, and religion,--repose
the fictions of the middle ages, especially those usually designated as
romances. These, such as we now know them, and such as display the
characteristics above mentioned, were originally metrical, and chiefly
written by natives of the north of France. The English and Germans
translated or imitated them. A new æra of romance began with the Amadis
de Gaul, derived, as some have thought, but upon insufficient evidence,
from a French metrical original, but certainly written in Portugal,
though in the Castilian language, by Vasco de Lobeyra, whose death is
generally fixed in 1325.[302] This romance is in prose; and though a
long interval seems to have elapsed before those founded on the story of
Amadis began to multiply, many were written in French during the latter
part of the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, derived from other
legends of chivalry, which became the popular reading, and superseded
the old metrical romances, already somewhat obsolete in their forms of
language.[303]
[302] Bouterwek, Hist. of Spanish Literature, p. 48.
[303] The oldest prose romance, which also is partly metrical, appears
to be Tristan of Leonois, one of the cycle of the round table,
written or translated by Lucas de Gast, about 1170. Roquefort, Etat
de la Poésie Française, p. 147.
|Popular moral fictions.|
60. As the taste of a chivalrous aristocracy was naturally delighted
with romances, that not only led the imagination through a series of
adventures, but presented a mirror of sentiments to which they
themselves pretended, so that of mankind in general found its
gratification, sometimes in tales of home growth, or transplanted from
the east, whether serious or amusing, such as the Gesta Romanorum, the
Dolopathos, the Decameron (certainly the most celebrated and best
written of these inventions), the Pecorone; sometimes in historical
ballads, or in moral fables, a favourite style of composition,
especially with the Teutonic nations; sometimes, again, in legends of
saints, and the popular demonology of the age. The experience and
sagacity, the moral sentiments, the invention and fancy of many obscure
centuries may be discerned more fully and favourably in these various
fictions than in their elaborate treatises. No one of the European
nations stands so high in this respect as the German; their ancient
tales have a raciness and truth which has been only imitated by others.
Among the most renowned of these we must place the story of Reynard the
Fox; the origin of which, long sought by literary critics, recedes, as
they prolong the inquiry, into greater depths of antiquity. It
was supposed to be written, or at least first published, in German
rhyme, by Henry of Alkmaar, in 1498; but earlier editions, in the
Flemish language, have since been discovered. It has been found written
in French verse by Jaquemars Gielée, of Lille, near the end, and in
French prose by Peter of St. Cloud, near the beginning, of the
thirteenth century. Finally, the principal characters are mentioned in a
Provençal song by Richard Cœur de Lion.[304] But though we thus bring
the story to France, where it became so popular as to change the very
name of the principal animal, which was always called goupil (vulpes)
till the fourteenth century, when it assumed, from the hero of the tale,
the name of Renard,[305] there seems every reason to believe that it is
of German origin; and, according to probable conjecture, a certain
Reinard of Lorraine, famous for his vulpine qualities in the ninth
century, suggested the name to some unknown fabulist of the empire.
[304] Recueil des anciens poètes, i. 21. M. Raynouard observes that
the Troubadours, and, first of all, Richard Cœur de Lion, have
quoted the story of Renard, sometimes with allusions not referrible
to the present romance. Journal des Sav. 1826, p. 340. A great deal
has been written about this story; but I shall only quote
Bouterwek, ix. 347; Heinsius, iv. 104, and the Biographie
Universelle; arts. Gielée. Alkmaar.
[305] Something like this nearly happened in England: bears have had
a narrow escape of being called only bruins, from their
representative in the fable.
|Exclusion of politics from literature.|
61. These moral fictions, as well as more serious productions, in what
may be called the ethical literature of the middle ages, towards which
Germany contributed a large share, speak freely of the vices of the
great. But they deal with them as men responsible to God, and subject to
natural law, rather than as members of a community. Of political
opinions, properly so called, which have in later times so powerfully
swayed the conduct of mankind, we find very little to say in the
fifteenth century. In so far as they were not merely founded on
temporary circumstances, or at most on the prejudices connected with
positive institutions in each country, the predominant associations that
influenced the judgment were derived from respect for birth, of which
opulence was as yet rather the sign than the substitute. This had long
been, and long continued to be, the characteristic prejudice of European
society. It was hardly ever higher than in the fifteenth century; when
heraldry, the language that speaks to the eye of pride, and the science
of those who despise every other, was cultivated with all its ingenious
pedantry; and every improvement in useful art, every creation in
inventive architecture, was made subservient to the grandeur of an
elevated class in society. The burghers, in those parts of Europe which
had become rich by commerce, emulated in their public distinctions, as
they did ultimately in their private families, the ensigns of patrician
nobility. This prevailing spirit of aristocracy was still but partially
modified by the spirit of popular freedom on one hand, or of respectful
loyalty on the other.
|Religious opinions.|
|Attacks on the church.|
62. It is far more important to observe the disposition of the public
mind in respect of religion, which not only claims to itself one great
branch of literature, but exerts a powerful influence over almost every
other. The greater part of literature in the middle ages, at least from
the twelfth century, may be considered as artillery levelled against the
clergy: I do not say against the church, which might imply a doctrinal
opposition by no means universal. But if there is one theme upon which
the most serious as well as the lightest, the most orthodox as the most
heretical writers are united, it is ecclesiastical corruption. Divided
among themselves, the secular clergy detested the regular; the regular
monks satirised the mendicant friars; who, in their turn, after exposing
both to the ill-will of the people, incurred a double portion of it
themselves. In this most important respect, therefore, the influence of
mediæval literature was powerful towards change. But it rather loosened
the associations of ancient prejudice, and prepared mankind for
revolutions of speculative opinion, than brought them forward.
|Three lines of religious opinion in fifteenth century.|
|Treatise de Imitatione Christi.|
63. It may be said in general, that three distinct currents of religious
opinion are discernible, on this side of the Alps, in the first part of
the fifteenth century. 1. The high pretensions of the Church of Rome to
a sort of moral, as well as theological, infallibility, and to a
paramount authority even in temporal affairs, when she should think fit
to interfere with them, were maintained by a great body in the monastic
and mendicant orders, and had still, probably, a considerable influence
over the people in most parts of Europe. 2. The councils of Constance
and Basle, and the contentions of the Gallican and German Churches
against the encroachments of the holy see, had raised up a strong
adverse party, supported occasionally by the government, and more
uniformly by the temporal lawyers and other educated laymen. It derived,
however, its greatest force from a number of sincere and earnest
persons, who set themselves against the gross vices of the time, and the
abuses grown up in the church through self-interest or connivance. They
were disgusted, also, at the scholastic systems, which had turned
religion into a matter of subtle dispute, while they laboured to found
it on devotional feeling and contemplative love. The mystical theology,
which, from seeking the illuminating influence and piercing love of the
Deity, often proceeded onward to visions of complete absorption in his
essence, till that itself was lost, as in the east, from which this
system sprung, in an annihilating pantheism, had never wanted, and can
never want, its disciples. Some, of whom Bonaventura is the most
conspicuous, opposed its enthusiastic emotions to the icy subtleties of
the schoolmen. Some appealed to the hearts of the people in their own
language. Such was Tauler, whose sermons were long popular and have
often been printed; and another was the unknown author of The German
Theology, a favourite work with Luther, and known by the Latin version
of Sebastian Castalio. Such, too, were Gerson and Clemangis, and such
were the numerous brethren who issued from the college of Deventer.[306]
One, doubtless of this class, whenever he may have lived, was author of
the celebrated treatise De Imitatione Christi (a title which has been
transferred from the first chapter to the entire work), commonly
ascribed to Thomas von Kempen or à Kempis, one of the Deventer society,
but the origin of which has been, and will continue to be, the subject
of strenuous controversy. Besides Thomas à Kempis, two candidates have
been supported by their respective partisans; John Gerson, the famous
chancellor of the university of Paris, and John Gersen, whose name
appears in one manuscript, and whom some contend to have been abbot of a
monastery at Vercelli in the thirteenth century, while others hold him
an imaginary being, except as a misnomer of Gerson. Several French
writers plead for their illustrious countrymen, and especially M. Gence,
one of the last who has revived the controversy; while the German and
Flemish writers, to whom the Sorbonne acceded, have always contended for
Thomas à Kempis, and Gersen has had the respectable support of
Bellarmin, Mabillon, and most of the Benedictine order.[307] The book
itself is said to have gone through 1800 editions, and has probably been
more read than any one work after the Scriptures. 3. A third religious
party consisted of the avowed or concealed heretics, some disciples of
the older sectaries, some of Wicliffe or Huss, resembling the school of
Gerson and Gerard Groot in their earnest piety, but drawing a more
decided line of separation between themselves and the ruling power, and
ripe for a more complete reformation than the others were inclined to
desire. It is not possible, however, for us to pronounce on all the
shades of opinion that might be secretly cherished in the fifteenth
century.
[306] Eichhorn, vi. 1-136, has amply and well treated the theological
literature of the fifteenth century. Mosheim is less satisfactory,
and Milner wants extent of learning; yet both will be useful to the
English reader. Eichhorn seems well acquainted with the mystical
divines, in p. 97, et post.
[307] I am not prepared to state the external evidence upon this keenly
debated question with sufficient precision. In a few words, it may,
I believe, be said, that in favour of Thomas à Kempis has been
alleged the testimony of many early editions bearing his name,
including one about 1471, which appears to be the first, as well as
a general tradition from his own time, extending over most of
Europe, which has led a great majority, including the Sorbonne
itself, to determine the cause in his favour. It is also said that
a manuscript of the treatise De Imitatione bears these words at the
conclusion: Finitus et completus per manum Thomæ de Kempis, 1441;
and that in this manuscript are so many erasures and alterations,
as give it the appearance of his original autograph. Against Thomas
à Kempis it is urged, that he was a professed caligrapher or
copyist for the college of Deventer; that the chronicle of St.
Agnes, a contemporary work, says of him: Scripsit Bibliam nostram
totaliter, et multos alios libros pro domo et pro pretio; that the
entry above mentioned is more like that of a transcriber than of an
author; that the same chronicle makes no mention of his having
written the treatise De Imitatione, nor does it appear in an early
list of works ascribed to him. For Gerson are brought forward a
great number of early editions in France, and still more in Italy,
among which is the first that bears a date (Venice, 1483), both in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and some other probabilities
are alleged. But this treatise is not mentioned in a list of his
writings given by himself. As to Gersen, his claim seems to rest on
a manuscript of great antiquity, which ascribes it to him, and
indirectly on all those manuscripts which are asserted to be older
than the time of Gerson and Thomas à Kempis. But, as I have before
observed, I do not profess to give a full view of the external
evidence, of which I possess but a superficial knowledge.
From the book itself, two remarks, which I do not pretend to be
novel, have suggested themselves. 1. The Gallicisms or Italicisms
are very numerous, and strike the reader at once; such as, Scientia
sine timore Dei quid importat?--Resiste in principio inclinationi
tuæ--Vigilia serotina--Homo passionatus--Vivere cum nobis
contrariantibus--Timoratior in cunctis actibus--Sufferentia crusis.
It seems strange that these barbarous adaptations of French or
Italian should have occurred to any one, whose native language was
Dutch; unless it can be shown, that through St. Bernard, or any
other ascetic writer, they had become naturalised in religious
style. 2. But, on the other hand, it seems impossible to resist the
conviction, that the author was an inhabitant of a monastery, which
was not the case with Gerson, originally a secular priest at Paris,
and employed for many years in active life, as chancellor of the
university, and one of the leaders of the Gallican church. The
whole spirit breathed by the treatise De Imitatione Christi is that
of a solitary ascetic:--Vellem me pluries tacuisse et inter homines
non fuisse--Sed quare tam libenter loquimur, et invicem fabulamur,
cum raro sine læsione conscientiæ ad silentium redimus.--Cella
continuata dulcescit, et male custodita tædium generat. Si in
principio conversionis tuæ bene eam incolueris et custodieris, erit
tibi posthac dilecta, amica, et gratissimum solatium.
As the former consideration seems to exclude Thomas à Kempis, so
the latter is unfavourable to the claims of Gerson. It has been
observed, however, that in one passage, l. i. c. 24, there is an
apparent allusion to Dante; which, if intended, must put an end to
Gersen, abbot of Vercelli, whom his supporters place in the first
part of the thirteenth century. But the allusion is not
indisputable. Various articles in the Biographie Universelle, from
the pen of M. Gence, maintain his favourite hypothesis; and M.
Daunou, in the Journal des Savans for 1826, and again in the volume
for 1827, seems to incline the same way. This is in the review of a
defence of the pretensions of Gersen, by M. Gregory, who adduces
some strong reasons to prove that the work is older than the
fourteenth century.
The book contains great beauty and heart-piercing truth in many of
its detached sentences, but places its rule of life in absolute
seclusion from the world, and seldom refers to the exercise of any
social, or even domestic duty. It has naturally been less a
favourite in Protestant countries, both from its monastic
character, and because those who incline towards Calvinism do not
find in it the phraseology to which they are accustomed. The
translations are very numerous, but there seems to be an inimitable
expression in its concise and energetic, though barbarous Latin.
|Scepticism. Defences of Christianity.|
64. Those of the second class were, perhaps, comparatively rare at this
time in Italy, and those of the third much more so. But the extreme
superstition of the popular creed, the conversation of Jews and
Mahometans, the unbounded admiration of pagan genius and virtue, the
natural tendency of many minds to doubt and to perceive difficulties,
which the schoolmen were apt to find everywhere, and nowhere to solve,
joined to the irreligious spirit of the Aristotelian philosophy,
especially as modified by Averroes, could not but engender a secret
tendency towards infidelity, the course of which may be traced with ease
in the writings of those ages. Thus the tale of the three rings in
Bocacce, whether original or not, may be reckoned among the sports of a
sceptical philosophy. But a proof, not less decisive, that the blind
faith we ascribe to the middle ages was by no means universal, results
from the numerous vindications of Christianity written in the fifteenth
century. Eichhorn, after referring to several passages in the works of
Petrarch, mentions defences of religion by Marcilius Ficinus, Alfonso de
Spina, a converted Jew, Savanarola, Æneas Sylvius, Picus of Mirandola.
He gives an analysis of the first, which, in its course of argument,
differs little from modern apologies of the same class.[308]
[308] Vol. vi. p. 24.
|Raimond de Sebonde.|
65. These writings, though by men so considerable as most of those he
has named, are very obscure at present; but the treatise of Raimond de
Sebonde is somewhat better known, in consequence of the chapter in
Montaigne entitled an apology for him. Montaigne had previously
translated into French the Theologia Naturalis of this Sebonde,
professor of medicine at Barcelona in the early part of the fifteenth
century. This has been called by some the first regular system of
natural theology; but, even if nothing of that kind could be found in
the writings of the schoolmen, which is certainly not the case, such an
appellation, notwithstanding the title, seems hardly due to Sebonde’s
book, which is intended, not so much to erect a fabric of religion
independent of revelation, as to demonstrate the latter by proofs
derived from the order of nature.
|His views misunderstood.|
66. Dugald Stewart, in his first dissertation prefixed to the
Encyclopædia Britannica, observes, that “the principal aim of Sebonde’s
book, according to Montaigne, is to show that Christians are in the
wrong to make human reasoning the basis of their belief, since the
object of it is only conceived by faith, and by a special inspiration of
the divine grace.” I have been able to ascertain that the excellent
author was not misled in this passage by any carelessness of his own,
but by confiding in Cotton’s translation of Montaigne, which absolutely
perverts the sense. Far from such being the aim of Sebonde, his book is
wholly devoted to the rational proofs of religion: and what Stewart, on
Cotton’s authority, has taken for a proposition of Sebonde himself, is
merely an objection which, according to Montaigne, some were apt to make
against his mode of reasoning. The passage is so very clear, that every
one who looks at Montaigne (l. ii. c. 12) must instantaneously perceive
the oversight which the translator has made; or he may satisfy himself
by the article on Sebonde in Bayle.
|His real object.|
67. The object of Sebonde’s book, according to himself, is to develop
those truths as to God and man, which are latent in nature, and through
which the latter may learn everything necessary; and especially may
understand Scripture, and have an infallible certainty of its truth.
This science is incorporate in all the books of the doctors of the
church, as the alphabet is in their words. It is the first science, the
basis of all others, and requiring no other to be previously known. The
scarcity of the book will justify an extract; which, though in very
uncouth Latin, will serve to give a notion of what Sebonde really aimed
at; but he labours with a confused expression, arising, partly, from the
vastness of his subject.[309]
[309] Duo sunt libri nobis dati a Deo: scilicet liber universitatis
creaturarum, sive liber naturæ, et alius est liber sacræ scripturæ.
Primus liber fuit datus homini a principio, dum universitas rerum
fuit condita, quoniam quælibet creatura non est nisi quædam litera
digito Dei scripta, et ex pluribus creaturis sicut ex pluribus
literis componitur liber. Ita componitur liber creaturarum, in quo
libro etiam continetur homo; et est principalior litera ipsius
libri. Et sicut literæ et dictiones factæ ex literis important et
includunt scientiam et diversas significationes et mirabiles
sententias: ita conformiter ipsæ creaturæ simul conjunctæ et ad
invicem comparatæ important et significant diversas significationes
et sententias, et continent scientiam homini necessariam. Secundus
autem liber scripturæ datus est homini secundo, et hoc in defectu
primi libri; eo quia homo nesciebat in primo legere, quia erat
cœcus; sed tamen primus liber creaturarum est omnibus communis,
quia solum clerici legere sciunt in eo [_i.e._ secundo].
Item primus liber, scilicet naturæ, non potest falsificari, nec
deleri, neque false interpretari; ideo hæretici non possunt eum
false intelligere, nec aliquis potest in eo fieri hæreticus. Sed
secundus potest falsificari et false interpretari et male
intelligi. Attamen uterque liber est ab eodem, quia idem Dominus et
creaturas condidit, et sacram Scripturam revelavit. Et ideo
conveniunt ad invicem, et non contradicit unus alteri, sed tamen
primus est nobis connaturalis, secundus supernaturalis. Præterea
cum homo sit naturaliter rationalis, et susceptibilis disciplinæ et
doctrinæ; et cum naturaliter a sua creatione nullam habeat actu
doctrinam neque scientiam, sit tamen aptus ad suscipiendum eam; et
cum doctrina et scientia sine libro, in quo scripta sit, non possit
haberi, convenientissimum fuit, ne frustra homo esset capax
doctrinæ et scientiæ, quod divina scientia homini librum creaverit,
in quo per se et sine magistro possit studere doctrinam
necessariam; propterea hoc totum istum mundum visibilem sibi
creavit, et dedit tanquam librum proprium et naturalem et
infallibilem, Dei digito scriptum, ubi singulæ creaturæ quasi
literæ sunt, non humano arbitrio sed divino juvante judicio ad
demonstrandum homini sapientiam et doctrinam sibi necessariam ad
salutem. Quam quidem sapientiam nullus potest videre, neque legere
per se in dicto libro semper aperto, nisi fuerit a Deo illuminatus
et a peccato originali mundatus. Et ideo nullus antiquorum
philosophorum paganorum potest legere hanc scientiam, quia erant
excæcati quantum ad propriam salutem, quamvis in dicto libro
legerunt aliquam scientiam, et omnem quam habuerunt ab eodem
contraxerunt; sed veram sapientiam quæ ducit ad vitam æternam,
quamvis fuerat in eo scripta, legere non potuerunt.
Ista autem scientia non est aliud nisi cogitare et videre
sapientiam scriptam in creaturis, et extrahere ipsam ab illis, et
ponere in animâ, et videre significationem creaturarum. Et sic
comparando ad aliam et conjungere sicut dictionem dictioni, et ex
tali conjunctione resultat sententia et significatio vera, dum
tamen scia homo intelligere et cognoscere.
|Nature of his arguments.|
68. Sebonde seems to have had floating in his mind, as this extract will
suggest, some of those theories as to the correspondence of the moral
and material world, which were afterwards propounded, in their cloudy
magnificence, by the Theosophists of the next two centuries. He
afterwards undertakes to prove the Trinity from the analogy of nature.
His argument is ingenious enough, if not quite of orthodox tendency,
being drawn from the scale of existence, which must lead us to a being
immediately derived from the First Cause. He proceeds to derive other
doctrines of Christianity from principles of natural reason; and after
this, which occupies about half a volume of 779 closely printed pages,
he comes to direct proofs of revelation: first, because God, who does
all for his own honour, would not suffer an impostor to persuade the
world that he was equal to God, which Mahomet never pretended;
and afterwards by other arguments more or less valid or ingenious.
69. We shall now adopt a closer and more chronological arrangement than
before, ranging under each decennial period the circumstances of most
importance in the general history of literature, as well as the
principal books published within it. This course we shall pursue till
the channels of learning become so various, and so extensively diffused
through several kingdoms, that it will be found convenient to deviate in
some measure from so strictly chronological a form, in order to
consolidate better the history of different sciences, and diminish, in
some measure, what can never wholly be removed from a work of this
nature--the confusion of perpetual change of subject.
CHAPTER III.
ON THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE FROM 1440 TO THE CLOSE OF THE FIFTEENTH
CENTURY.
SECT. I. 1440-1450.
_Classical Literature in Italy--Nicolas V.--Laurentius Valla._
|The year 1440 not chosen as an epoch.|
1. The reader is not to consider the year 1440 as a marked epoch in the
annals of literature. It has sometimes been treated as such, by those
who have referred the invention of printing to this particular epoch.
But it is here chosen as an arbitrary line, nearly coincident with the
complete development of an ardent thirst for classical, and especially
Grecian, literature in Italy, as the year 1400 was with its first
manifestation.
|Continual progress of learning.|
|Nicolas V.|
2. No very conspicuous events belong to this decennial period. The
spirit of improvement, already so powerfully excited in Italy, continued
to produce the same effects in rescuing ancient manuscripts from the
chances of destruction, accumulating them in libraries, making
translations from the Greek, and by intense labour in the perusal of the
best authors, rendering both their substance and their language familiar
to the Italian scholar. The patronage of Cosmo de’ Medici, Alfonso king
of Naples, and Nicolas of Este, has already been mentioned. Lionel,
successor of the last prince, was by no means inferior to him in love of
letters. But they had no patron so important as Nicolas V. (Thomas of
Sarzana), who became Pope in 1447; nor has any later occupant of that
chair, without excepting Leo X., deserved equal praise as an encourager
of learning. Nicolas founded the Vatican library, and left it, at his
death in 1455, enriched with 5000 volumes; a treasure far exceeding that
of any other collection in Europe. Every scholar who needed maintenance,
which was of course the common case, found it at the court of Rome;
innumerable benefices, all over Christendom, which had fallen into the
grasp of the holy see, and frequently required of their incumbents, as
is well known, neither residence, nor even the priestly character,
affording the means of generosity, which have seldom been so laudably
applied. Several Greek authors were translated into Latin by direction
of Nicolas V., among which are the history of Diodorus Siculus, and
Xenophon’s Cyropædia, by Poggio,[310] who still enjoyed the office of
apostolical secretary, as he had under Eugenius IV., and with still more
abundant munificence on the part of the pope; Herodotus and Thucydides
by Valla, Polybius by Peroti, Appian by Decembrio, Strabo by Gregory of
Tiferno and Guarino of Verona, Theophrastus by Gaza, Plato de Legibus,
Ptolemy’s Almagest, and the Præparatio Evangelica of Eusebius, by George
of Trebizond.[311] These translations, it has been already
observed, will not bear a very severe criticism, but certainly there was
an extraordinary cluster of learning round the chair of this excellent
pope.
[310] This translation of Diodorus has been ascribed by some of our
writers, even since the error has been pointed out, to John Free,
an Englishman, who had heard the lectures of the younger Guarini in
Italy. Quod opus, Leland observes, Itali Poggio vanissime
attribuunt Florentino. De Scriptor. Britann. p. 462. But it bears
the name of Poggio in the two editions printed in 1472 and 1493;
and Leland seems to have been deceived by some one who had put
Free’s name on a manuscript of the translation. Poggio, indeed, in
his preface, declares that he undertook it by command of Nicolas V.
See Niceron, ix. 158; Zeno, Dissertazioni Vossiane, i. 41;
Ginguéné, iii. 245. Pits follows Leland in ascribing a translation
of Diodorus to Free, and quotes the first words: thus, if it still
should be suggested that this may be a different work, there are
the means of proving it.
[311] Heeren, p. 72.
|Justice due to his character.|
3. Corniani remarks, that if Nicolas V., like some popes, had raised a
distinguished family, many pens would have been employed to immortalise
him; but not having surrounded himself with relations, his fame has been
much below his merits. Gibbon, one of the first to do full justice to
Nicolas, has made a similar observation. How striking the contrast
between this pope and his famous predecessor Gregory I., who, if he did
not burn and destroy heathen authors, was at least anxious to discourage
the reading of them! These eminent men, like Michael Angelo’s figures of
Night and Morning, seem to stand at the two gates of the middle ages,
emblems and heralds of the mind’s long sleep, and of its awakening.
|Poggio on the ruins of Rome.|
4. Several little treatises by Poggio, rather in a moral than political
strain, display an observing and intelligent mind. Such are those on
nobility, and on the unhappiness of princes. For these, which were
written before 1440, the reader may have recourse to Shepherd, Corniani,
or Ginguéné. A later essay, if we may so call it, on the vicissitudes of
fortune, begins with rather an interesting description of the ruins of
Rome. It is an enumeration of the more conspicuous remains of the
ancient city; and we may infer from it that no great devastation or
injury has taken place since the fifteenth century. Gibbon has given an
account of this little tract, which is not, as he shows, the earliest
description of the ruins of Rome. Poggio, I will add, seems not to have
known some things with which we are familiar; as the Cloaca Maxima, the
fragments of the Servian wall, the Mamertine prison, the temple of
Nerva, the Giano Quadrifonte; and, by some odd misinformation, believes
that the tomb of Cecilia Metella, which he had seen entire, was
afterwards destroyed.[312] This leads to a conjecture that the treatise
was not finished during his residence at Rome, and consequently not
within the present decennium.
[312] Ad calcem postea majore ex parte exterminatum.
|Account of the East, by Conti.|
5. In the fourth book of this treatise, De Varietate Fortunæ, Poggio has
introduced a remarkable narration of travels by a Venetian, Nicolo di
Conti, who, in 1419, had set off from his country, and after passing
many years in Persia and India, returned home in 1444. His account of
those regions, in some respects the earliest on which reliance could be
placed, will be found rendered into Italian from a Portuguese version of
Poggio, in the first volume of Ramusio. That editor seems not to have
known that the original was in print.
|Laurentius Valla.|
6. A far more considerable work by Laurentius Valla, on the graces of
the Latin language, is rightly, I believe, placed within this period;
but it is often difficult to determine the dates of books published
before the invention of printing. Valla, like Poggio, had long earned
the favour of Alfonso, but, unlike him, had forfeited that of the court
of Rome. His character was very irascible and overbearing; a fault too
general with the learned of the fifteenth century; but he may, perhaps,
be placed at the head of the literary republic at this time; for, if
inferior to Poggio, as probably he was, in vivacity and variety of
genius, he was undoubtedly above him in what was then most valued and
most useful, grammatical erudition.
|His attack on the court of Rome.|
7. Valla began with an attack on the court of Rome, in his declamation
against the donation of Constantine. Some have in consequence reckoned
him among the precursors of Protestantism; while others have imputed to
the Roman see, that he was pursued with its hostility for questioning
that pretended title to sovereignty. But neither of these
representations is just. Valla confines himself altogether to the
temporal principality of the pope; but in this his language must be
admitted to have been so abusive as to render the resentment of the
court of Rome not unreasonable.[313]
[313] A few lines will suffice as a specimen. O Romani pontifices,
exemplum facinorum omnium cæteris pontificibus, et improbissimi
scribæ et pharisæi, qui sedetis super cathedram Moysi, et opera
Dathan et Abyron facitis, itane vestimenta apparatûs, pompa
equitatus, omnis denique vita Cæsaris, vicarium Christi decebit?
The whole tone is more like Luther’s violence, than what we should
expect from an Italian of the fifteenth century. But it is with the
ambitious spirit of aggrandisement as temporal princes, that he
reproaches the pontiffs; nor can it be denied, that Martin and
Eugenius had given provocation for his invective. Nec amplius
horrenda vox audiatur, partes contra ecclesiam; ecclesia contra
Perusinos pugnat, contra Bononienses. Non contra Christianos pugnat
ecclesia, sed papa. Of the papal claim to temporal sovereignty by
prescription, Valla writes indignantly. Præscripsit Romana
ecclesia; o imperiti, o divini juris ignari. Nullus quantumvis
annorum numerus verum abolere titulum potest. Præscripsit Romana
ecclesia. Tace, nefaria lingua. Præscriptionem quæ fit de rebus
mutis atque irrationalibus, ad hominem transfers; cujus quo
diuturnior in servitute possessio, eo detestabilior.
|His treatise on the Latin language.|
8. The more famous work of Valla, De Elegantiis Latinæ Linguæ, begins
with too arrogant an assumption. “These books,” he says, “will contain
nothing that has been said by any one else. For many ages past, not only
no man has been able to speak Latin, but none have understood the Latin
they read: the studious of philosophy have had no comprehension of the
philosophers,--the advocates of the orators,--the lawyers of the
jurists,--the general scholar of any writers of antiquity.” Valla,
however, did at least incomparably more than any one who had preceded
him; and it would probably appear, that a great part of the distinctions
in Latin syntax, inflection, and synonymy, which our best grammars
contain, may be traced to his work. It is to be observed, that he made
free use of the ancient grammarians, so that his vaunt of originality
must be referred to later times. Valla is very copious as to synonyms,
on which the delicate, and even necessary understanding of a language
mainly depends. If those have done most for any science who have carried
it furthest from the point whence they set out, philology seems to owe
quite as much to Valla as to any one who has come since. The treatise
was received with enthusiastic admiration, continually reprinted,
honoured with a paraphrase by Erasmus, commented, abridged, extracted,
and even turned into verse.[314]
[314] Corniani, ii. 221. The editions of Valla de Elegantiis, recorded
by Panzer, are twenty-eight in the fifteenth century, beginning in
1471, and thirty-one in the first thirty-six years of the next.
|Its defects.|
9. Valla, however, self-confident and of no good temper, in censuring
the language of others, fell not unfrequently into mistakes of his own.
Vives and Budæus, coming in the next century, and in a riper age of
philology, blame the hypercritical disposition of one who had not the
means of pronouncing negatively on Latin words and phrases, from his
want of sufficient dictionaries: his fastidiousness became what they
call superstition, imposing captious scruples and unnecessary
observances on himself and the world.[315] And of this species of
superstition there has been much since his time in philology.
[315] Vives, De Tradendis Disciplinis, i. 478. Budæus observes: Ego
Laurentium Vallensem, egregii spiritus virum, existimo sæculi sui
imperitia offensum primum Latine loquendi consuetudinem constituere
summa religione institisse; deinde judicii cerimonia singulari, cum
profectus quoque diligentiam æquasset, in eam superstitionem sensim
delapsum esse, ut et sese ipse et alios captiosis observationibus
scribendique legibus obligaret. Commentar. in Ling. Græc. p. 26.
(1529). But sometimes, perhaps, Valla is right, and Budæus wrong in
censuring him; as, where he disputes the former’s rule, that two
epithets, not being placed as predicates, cannot be joined in Latin
prose to a substantive without a copula, on no better grounds than
such an usage of the pronoun suus, or a phrase like privata res
maritima in Cicero, where res maritima is in the nature of a single
word, like res publica. The rule is certainly a good one, even if a
few better exceptions can be found.
|Heeren’s praise of it.|
10. Heeren, one of the few who have, in modern times, spoken of this
work from personal knowledge, and with sufficient learning, gives it a
high character. “Valla was, without doubt, the best acquainted with
Latin of any man in his age; yet, no pedantic Ciceronian, he had studied
in all the classical writers of Rome. His Elegantiæ are a work on
grammar; they contain an explanation of refined turns of expression;
especially where they are peculiar to Latin. They display not only an
exact knowledge of that tongue, but often also a really philosophical
study of language in general. In an age when nothing was so much valued
as a good Latin style, yet when the helps, of which we now possess so
many, were all wanting, such a work must obtain a great success, since
it relieved a necessity which every one felt.”[316]
[316] P. 220.
|Valla’s annotations on the New Testament.|
11. We have to give this conspicuous scholar a place in another line of
criticism, that on the text and interpretation of the New Testament. His
annotations are the earliest specimen of explanations founded on the
original language. In the course of these, he treats the Vulgate with
some severity. But Valla is said to have had but a slight knowledge of
Greek;[317] and it must also be owned, that with all his merit as
a Latin critic, he wrote indifferently, and with less classical spirit
than his adversary Poggio. The invectives of these against each other do
little honour to their memory, and are not worth recording in this
volume, though they could not be omitted in a legitimate history of the
Italian scholars.
[317] Annis abhinc ducentis Herodotum et Thucydidem Latinis literis
exponebat Laurentius Valla, in ea bene et eleganter dicendi copia,
quam totis voluminibus explicavit, inelegans tamen, et pæne
barbarus, Græcis ad hoc literis leviter tinctus, ad auctorum
sententias parum attentus, oscitans sæpe, et alias res agens, fidem
apud eruditos decoxit. Huet de claris interpretibus, apud Blount.
Daunou, however, in the Biographie Universelle, art. Thucydides,
asserts that Valla’s translation of that historian is generally
faithful. This would show no inconsiderable knowledge of Greek for
that age.
SECT. II. 1450-1460.
_Greeks in Italy--Invention of Printing._
|Fresh arrival of Greeks in Italy.|
12. The capture of Constantinople in 1453 drove a few learned Greeks,
who had lingered to the last amidst the crash of their ruined empire, to
the hospitable and admiring Italy. Among these have been reckoned
Argyropulus and Chalcondyles, successively teachers of their own
language, Andronicus Callistus, who is said to have followed the same
profession both there and at Rome, and Constantine Lascaris, of an
imperial family, whose lessons were given for several years at Milan,
and afterwards at Messina. It seems, however, to be proved that
Argyropulus had been already for several years in Italy.[318]
[318] Hody. Tiraboschi. Roscoe.
|Platonists and Aristotelians.|
13. The cultivation of Greek literature gave rise about this time to a
vehement controversy, which had some influence on philosophical opinions
in Italy. Gemistus Pletho, a native of the Morea, and one of those who
attended the council of Florence in 1439, being an enthusiastic votary
of the Platonic theories in metaphysics and natural theology
communicated to Cosmo de’ Medici part of his own zeal; and from that
time the citizen of Florence formed a scheme of establishing an academy
of learned men, to discuss and propagate the Platonic system. This seems
to have been carried into effect early in the present decennial period.
|Their controversy.|
14. Meantime, a treatise by Pletho, wherein he not only extolled the
Platonic philosophy, which he mingled, as was then usual, with that of
the Alexandrian school, and of the spurious writings attributed to
Zoroaster and Hermes, but inveighed without measure against Aristotle
and his disciples, had aroused the Aristotelians of Greece, where, as in
western Europe, their master’s authority had long prevailed. It seems
not improbable that the Platonists were obnoxious to the orthodox party,
for sacrificing their own church to that of Rome; and there is also
strong ground for ascribing a rejection of Christianity to Pletho. The
dispute, at least, began in Greece, where Pletho’s treatise met with an
angry opponent in Gennadius, patriarch of Constantinople.[319] It soon
spread to Italy; Theodore Gaza embracing the cause of Aristotle with
temper and moderation,[320] and George of Trebizond, a far inferior man,
with invectives against the Platonic philosophy and its founder. Others
replied in the same tone; and whether from ignorance or from rudeness,
this controversy appears to have been managed as much with abuse of the
lives and characters of two philosophers, dead nearly two thousand
years, as with any rational discussion of their tenets. Both sides,
however, strove to make out, what in fact was the ultimate object, that
the doctrine they maintained was more consonant to the Christian
religion than that of their adversaries. Cardinal Bessarion, a man of
solid and elegant learning, replied to George of Trebizond in a book
entitled Adversus Calumniatorem Platonis; one of the first books that
appeared from the Roman press, in 1470. This dispute may possibly have
originated, at least in Greece, before 1450; and it was certainly
continued beyond 1460, the writings both of George and Bessarion
appearing to be rather of later date.[321]
[319] Pletho’s death, in an extreme old age, is fixed by Brucker, on
the authority of George of Trebizond, before the capture of
Constantinople. A letter, indeed, of Bessarion, in 1462 (Mém. de
l’Acad. des Inscript. vol. ii.), seems to imply that he was then
living; but this cannot have been the case. Gennadius, his enemy,
abdicated the patriarchate of Constantinople in 1458, having been
raised to it in 1453. The public burning of Pletho’s book was in
the intermediate time; and it is agreed that this was done after
his death.
[320] Hody, p. 79, doubts whether Gaza’s vindication of Aristotle were
not merely verbal, in conversation with Bessarion; which is however
implicitly contradicted by Boivin and Tiraboschi, who assert him to
have written against Pletho. The comparison of Plato and Aristotle
by George of Trebizond was published at Venice in 1523, as Heeren
says, on the authority of Fabricius.
[321] The best account, and that from which later writers have freely
borrowed, of this philosophical controversy, is by Boivin, in the
second volume of the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions, p. 15.
Brucker, iv. 40, Buhle, ii. 107, and Tiraboschi, vi. 303, are my
other authorities.
15. Bessarion himself was so far from being as unjust towards Aristotle
as his opponent was towards Plato, that he translated his
metaphysics. That philosopher, though almost the idol of the schoolmen,
lay still in some measure under the ban of the church, which had very
gradually removed the prohibition she laid on his writings in the
beginning of the thirteenth century. Nicholas V. first permitted them to
be read without restriction in the universities.[322]
[322] Launoy, De Varia Aristotelis Fortuna in Academia Parisiensi,
p. 44.
|Marsilius Ficinus.|
16. Cosmo de’ Medici selected Marsilius Ficinus, as a youth of great
promise, to be educated in the mysteries of Platonism, that he might
become the chief and preceptor of the new academy; nor did the devotion
of the young philosopher fall short of the patron’s hope. Ficinus
declares himself to have profited as much by the conversation of Cosmo
as by the writings of Plato; but this is said in a dedication to
Lorenzo, and the author has not, on other occasions, escaped the
reproach of flattery. He began as early as 1456, at the age of
twenty-three, to write on the Platonic philosophy; but being as yet
ignorant of Greek, prudently gave way to the advice of Cosmo and
Landino, that he should acquire more knowledge before he imparted it to
the world.[323]
[323] Brucker, iv. 50. Roscoe.
|Invention of printing.|
17. The great glory of this decennial period is the invention of
printing, or at least, as all must allow, its application to the
purposes of useful learning. The reader will not expect a minute
discussion of so long and unsettled a controversy as that which the
origin of this art has furnished. For those who are little conversant
with the subject, a very few particulars may be thought necessary.
|Block-books.|
18. About the end of the fourteenth century we find a practice of taking
impressions from engraved blocks of wood, sometimes for playing cards,
which came into use not long before that time; sometimes for rude cuts
of saints.[324] The latter were frequently accompanied by a few lines of
letters cut in the block. Gradually entire pages were impressed in this
manner; and thus began what are called block books, printed in fixed
characters, but never exceeding a very few leaves. Of these there exist
nine or ten, often reprinted, as it is generally thought, between 1400
and 1440.[325] In using the word printed, it is of course not intended
to prejudice the question as to the real art of printing. These block
books seem to have been all executed in the Low Countries. They are said
to have been followed by several editions of the short grammar of
Donatus in wooden stereotype.[326] These also were printed in Holland.
This mode of printing from blocks of wood has been practised in China
from time immemorial.
[324] Heinekke and others have proved that playing cards were known in
Germany as early as 1299; but these were probably painted.
Lambinet, Origines de l’Imprimerie. Singer’s History of Playing
Cards. The earliest cards were on parchment.
[325] Lambinet, Singer, Ottley, Dibdin, &c.
[326] Lambinet.
|Gutenberg and Costar’s claims.|
19. The invention of printing, in the modern sense, from moveable
letters, has been referred by most to Gutenberg, a native of Mentz, but
settled at Strasburg. He is supposed to have conceived the idea before
1440, and to have spent the next ten years in making attempts at
carrying it into effect, which some assert him to have done in short
fugitive pieces, actually printed from his moveable wooden characters
before 1450. But of the existence of these there seems to be no
evidence.[327] Gutenberg’s priority is disputed by those who deem
Lawrence Costar, of Haarlem, the real inventor of the art. According to
a tradition, which seems not to be traced beyond the middle of the
sixteenth century, but resting afterwards upon sufficient testimony to
prove its local reception, Costar substituted moveable for fixed letters
as early as 1430; and some have believed that a book called Speculum
Humanæ Salvationis, of very rude wooden characters, proceeded from the
Haarlem press before any other that is generally recognised.[328] The
tradition adds, that an unfaithful servant having fled with the secret,
set up for himself at Strasburg, or Mentz; and this treachery was
originally ascribed to Gutenberg or Fust, but seems, since they have
been manifestly cleared of it, to have been laid on one Gensfleisch,
reputed to be the brother of Gutenberg.[329] The evidence, however,
as to this, is highly precarious; and even if we were to admit
the claims of Costar, there seems no fair reason to dispute that
Gutenberg might also have struck out an idea, that surely did not
require any extraordinary ingenuity, and which left the most important
difficulties to be surmounted, as they undeniably were, by himself and
his coadjutors.[330]
[327] Mémoires de l’Acad. des Inscript. xvii. 762. Lambinet, p. 113.
[328] In Mr. Ottley’s History of Engraving, the claims of Costar are
strongly maintained, though chiefly on the authority of Meerman’s
proofs, which go to establish the local tradition. But the evidence
of Ludovico Guicciardini is an answer to those who treat it as a
forgery of Hadrian Junius. Santander, Lambinet, and most recent
investigators are for Mentz against Haarlem.
[329] Gensfleisch seems to have been the name of that branch of the
Gutenberg family to which the inventor of printing belonged. Biogr.
Univ., art. Gutenberg.
[330] Lambinet, p. 315.
|Progress of the invention.|
20. It is agreed by all, that about 1450, Gutenberg, having gone to
Mentz, entered into partnership with Fust, a rich merchant of that city,
for the purpose of carrying the invention into effect, and that Fust
supplied him with considerable sums of money. The subsequent steps are
obscure. According to a passage in the Annales Hirsargienses of
Trithemius, written sixty years afterwards, but on the authority of a
grandson of Peter Schæffer, their assistant in the work, it was about
1452 that the latter brought the art to perfection, by devising an
easier mode of casting types.[331] This passage has been interpreted,
according to a lax construction, to mean, that Schæffer invented the
method of casting types in a matrix; but seems more strictly to mean,
that we owe to him the great improvement in letter-casting, namely, the
punches of engraved steel, by which the matrices or moulds are struck,
and without which, independent of the economy of labour, there could be
no perfect uniformity of shape. Upon the former supposition, Schæffer
may be reckoned the main inventor of the art of printing; for moveable
wooden letters, though small books may possibly have been printed by
means of them, are so inconvenient, and letters of cut metal so
expensive, that few great works were likely to have passed through the
press, till cast types were employed. Van Praet, however, believes the
psalter of 1457 to have been printed from wooden characters; and some
have conceived letters of cut metal to have been employed both in that
and in the first Bible. Lambinet, who thinks “the essence of the art of
printing is in the engraved punch,” naturally gives the chief credit to
Schæffer;[332] but this is not the more usual opinion.
[331] Petrus Opilio de Gernsheim, tunc famulus inventoris primi Joannis
Fust, homo ingeniosus et prudens, faciliorem modum fundendi
characteras excogitavit, et artem, ut nunc est, complevit.
Lambinet, i. 101. See Daunou contra. Id. 417.
[332] ii. 213. In another place, he divides the praise better: Gloire
donc à Gutenberg, qui, le premier, conçut l’idée de la typographie,
en imaginant la mobilité des caractères, qui en est l’âme; gloire à
Fust, qui en fît usage avec lui, et sans lequel nous ne jouirions
peut-être pas de ce bienfait; gloire à Schæffer, à qui nous devons
tout le mécanisme, et toutes les merveilles de l’art. i. 119.
|First printed Bible.|
21. The earliest book, properly so called, is now generally believed to
be the Latin Bible, commonly called the Mazarin Bible, a copy having
been found, about the middle of the last century, in Cardinal Mazarin’s
library at Paris.[333] It is remarkable, that its existence was unknown
before; for it can hardly be called a book of very extraordinary
scarcity, nearly twenty copies being in different libraries, half of
them in those of private persons in England.[334] No date appears in
this Bible, and some have referred its publication to 1452, or even to
1450, which few perhaps would at present maintain; while others have
thought the year 1455 rather more probable.[335] In a copy belonging to
the royal library at Paris, an entry is made, importing that it was
completed in binding and illuminating at Mentz, on the feast of the
Assumption (Aug. 15), 1456. But Trithemius, in the passage above quoted,
seems to intimate that no book had been printed in 1452; and,
considering the lapse of time that would naturally be employed in such
an undertaking during the infancy of the art, and that we have no other
printed book of the least importance to fill up the interval till 1457,
and also that the binding and illuminating the above-mentioned copy is
likely to have followed the publication at no great length of time, we
may not err in placing its appearance in the year 1455, which will
secure its hitherto unimpeached priority in the records of
bibliography.[336]
[333] The Cologne chronicle says: Anno Domini 1450, qui jubilæus erat,
cœptum est imprimi, primusque liber, qui excudebatur, biblia fuere
Latina.
[334] Bibliotheca Sussexiana, i. 293. (1827.) The number there
enumerated is eighteen; nine in public, and nine in private
libraries; three of the former, and all the latter, English.
[335] Lambinet thinks it was probably not begun before 1453, nor
published till the end of 1455. i. 130. See, on this Bible, an
article by Dr. Dibdin, in Valpy’s Classical Journal, No. 8; which
collects the testimonies of his predecessors.
[336] It is very difficult to pronounce on the means employed in the
earliest books, which are almost all controverted. This bible is
thought by Fournier, himself a letter founder, to be printed from
wooden types; by Meerman, from types cut in metal; by Heinekke and
Daunou from cast types, which is most probable. Lambinet, i. 417.
Daunou does not believe that any book was printed with types cut
either in wood or metal; and that, after block books, there were
none but with cast letters like those now in use, invented by
Gutenberg, perfected by Schæffer, and first employed by them and
Fust in the Mazarin Bible. Id. p. 423.
|Beauty of the book.|
22. It is a very striking circumstance, that the high-minded inventors
of this great art tried at the very outset so bold a flight as the
printing an entire Bible, and executed it with astonishing success. It
was Minerva leaping on earth in her divine strength and radiant armour,
ready at the moment of her nativity to subdue and destroy her enemies.
The Mazarin Bible is printed, some copies on vellum, some on paper of
choice quality, with strong, black, and tolerably handsome characters,
but with some want of uniformity, which has led, perhaps unreasonably,
to a doubt whether they were cast in a matrix. We may see in imagination
this venerable and splendid volume leading up the crowded myriads of its
followers, and imploring, as it were, a blessing on the new art, by
dedicating its first fruits to the service of Heaven.
|Early printed sheets.|
23. A metrical exhortation, in the German language, to take arms against
the Turks, dated in 1454, has been retrieved in the present century. If
this date unequivocally refers to the time of printing, which does not
seem a necessary consequence, it is the earliest loose sheet that is
known to be extant. It is said to be in the type of what is called the
Bamberg Bible, which we shall soon have to mention. Two editions of
Letters of Indulgence from Nicolas V., bearing the date of 1454, are
extant in single printed sheets, and two more editions of 1455;[337] but
it has justly been observed, that, even if published before the Mazarin
Bible, the printing of that great volume must have commenced long
before. An almanac for the year 1457 has also been detected; and as
fugitive sheets of this kind are seldom preserved, we may justly
conclude that the art of printing was not dormant, so far as these light
productions are concerned. A Donatus, with Schæffer’s name, but no date,
may or may not be older than a psalter published in 1457 by Fust and
Schæffer (the partnership with Gutenberg having been dissolved in
November, 1455, and having led to a dispute and litigation), with a
colophon, or notice, subjoined in the last page, in these words:
Psalmorum codex venustate capitalium decoratus, rubricationibusque
sufficienter distinctus, adinventione artificiosa imprimendi ac
caracterizandi, absque calami ulla exaratione sic effigiatus, et ad
eusebiam Dei industrie est summatus. Per Johannem Fust, civem
Moguntinum, et Petrum Schæffer de Gernsheim, anno Domini millesimo
cccclvii. In vigilia Assumptionis.[338]
A colophon, substantially similar, is subjoined to several of the
Fustine editions. And this seems hard to reconcile with the story that
Fust sold his impressions at Paris, as late as 1463, for manuscripts.
[337] Brunet, Supplément au Manuel du Libraire. It was not known till
lately that more than one edition out of these four was in
existence, Santander thinks their publication was after 1460. Dict.
Bibliographique du 15me Siècle, i. 92. But this seems improbable,
from the transitory character of the subject. He argues from a
resemblance in the letters to those used by Fust and Schæffer in
the Durandi Rationale of 1459.
[338] Dibdin’s Bibliotheca Spenceriana. Biogr. Univ., Gutenberg, &c.
In the Donatus above mentioned, the method of printing is also
mentioned: Explicit Donatus arte nova imprimendi seu caracterizandi
per Petrum de Gernsheim in urbe Moguntina effigiatus. Lambinet
considers this and the Bible to be the first specimens of
typography, for he doubts the Literæ Indulgentiarum, though
probably with no cause.
|Psalter of 1459. Other early books.|
24. Another psalter was printed by Fust and Schæffer with similar
characters in 1459; and in the same year, Durandi Rationale, a treatise
on the liturgical offices of the church; of which Van Praet says, that
it is perhaps the earliest with cast types to which Fust and Schæffer
have given their name and a date.[339] The two psalters he conceives to
have been printed from wood. But this would be disputed by other eminent
judges.[340] In 1460, a work of considerable size, the Catholicon of
Balbi, came out from an opposition press, established at Mentz by
Gutenberg. The Clementine Constitutions, part of the canon law, were
also printed by him in the same year.
[339] Lambinet, i. 154.
[340] Lambinet, Dibdin. The former thinks the inequality of letters
observed in the psalter of 1457 may proceed from their being cast
in a matrix of plaster or clay, instead of metal.
|Bible of Pfister.|
25. These are the only monuments of early typography acknowledged to
come within the present decennium. A Bible without a date, supposed by
some to have been printed by Pfister at Bamberg, though ascribed by
others to Gutenberg himself, is reckoned by good judges certainly prior
to 1462, and perhaps as early as 1460. Daunou and others refer it to
1461. The antiquities of typography, after all the pains bestowed upon
them, are not unlikely to receive still further elucidation in the
course of time.
|Greek first taught at Paris.|
26. On the 19th of January, 1458, as Crevier, with a minuteness becoming
the subject, informs us, the university of Paris received a petition
from Gregory, a native of Tiferno, in the kingdom of Naples, to be
appointed teacher of Greek. His request was granted, and a salary of one
hundred crowns assigned to him, on condition that he should teach
gratuitously, and deliver two lectures every day, one on the Greek
language, and the other on the art of rhetoric.[341] From this
auspicious circumstance Crevier deduces the restoration of ancient
literature in the university of Paris, and consequently in the kingdom
of France. For above two hundred years, the scholastic logic and
philosophy had crushed polite letters. No mention is made of rhetoric,
that is, of the art that instructs in the ornaments of style, in any
statute or record of the university since the beginning of the
thirteenth century. If the Greek language, as Crevier supposes, had not
been wholly neglected, it was, at least, so little studied, that entire
neglect would have been practically the same.
[341] Crevier, Hist. de l’Univ. de Paris, iv. 243.
|Leave unwillingly granted.|
27. This concession was, perhaps, unwillingly made, and, as frequently
happens in established institutions, it left the prejudices of the
ruling party rather stronger than before. The teachers of Greek and
rhetoric were specially excluded from the privileges of regency by the
faculty of arts. These branches of knowledge were looked upon as
unessential appendages to a good education, very much as the modern
languages are treated in our English schools and universities at this
day. A bigoted adherence to old systems, and a lurking reluctance that
the rising youth should become superior in knowledge to ourselves, were
no peculiar evil spirits that haunted the university of Paris, though
none ever stood more in need of a thorough exorcism. For many years
after this time, the Greek and Latin languages were thus taught by
permission, and with very indifferent success.
|Purbach; his mathematical discoveries.|
28. Purbach, or Peurbach, native of a small Austrian town of that name,
has been called the first restorer of mathematical science in Europe.
Ignorant of Greek, and possessing only a bad translation of Ptolemy,
lately made by George of Trebizond,[342] he yet was able to explain the
rules of physical astronomy and the theory of the planetary motions far
better than his predecessors. But his chief merit was in the
construction of trigonometrical tables. The Greeks had introduced the
sexagesimal division, not only of the circle, but of the radius, and
calculated chords according to this scale. The Arabians, who, about the
ninth century, first substituted the sine, or half chord of the double
arch, in their tables, preserved the same graduation. Purbach made one
step towards a decimal scale, which the new notation by Arabic numerals
rendered highly convenient, by dividing the radius, or sinus totus, as
it was then often called, into 600,000 parts, and gave rules for
computing the sines of arcs; which he himself also calculated, for every
minute of the quadrant, as Delambre and Kästner think, or for every ten
minutes, according to Gassendi and Hutton, in parts of this radius. The
tables of Albaten the Arabian geometer, the inventor, as far as appears,
of sines, had extended only to quarters of a degree.[343]
[342] Montucla, Biogr. Univ. It is however certain, and is admitted by
Delambre, the author of this article in the Biog. Univ., that
Purbach made considerable progress in abridging and explaining the
text of this translation, which, if ignorant of the original, he
must have done by his mathematical knowledge. Kästner, ii. 521.
[343] Montucla, Hist. des Mathématiques, i. 539. Hutton’s Mathematical
Dictionary, and his Introduction to Logarithms. Gassendi, Vita
Purbachii. Biogr. Univ. Peurbach (by Delambre). Kästner, Geschichte
der Mathematik, i. 529-543, 572; ii. 319. Gassendi twice gives
6,000,000 for the parts of Purbach’s radius. None of these writers
seem comparable in accuracy to Kästner.
|Other mathematicians.|
29. Purbach died young, in 1461, when, by the advice of Cardinal
Bessarion, he was on the point of setting out for Italy, in order to
learn Greek. His mantle descended on Regiomontanus, a disciple, who went
beyond his master, though he has sometimes borne away his due credit. A
mathematician rather earlier than Purbach, was Nicolas Cusanus, raised
to the dignity of cardinal in 1448. He was by birth a German, and
obtained a considerable reputation for several kinds of knowledge.[344]
But he was chiefly distinguished for the tenet of the earth’s motion,
which, however, according to Montucla, he proposed only as an ingenious
hypothesis. Fioravanti, of Bologna, is said, on contemporary authority,
to have removed, in 1455, a tower with its foundation, to a
distance of several feet, and to have restored to the perpendicular one
at Cento seventy-five feet high, which had swerved five feet.[345]
[344] A work upon statics, or rather upon the weight of bodies in
water, by Cusanus, seems chiefly remarkable, as it shows both a
disposition to ascertain physical truths by experiment, and an
extraordinary misapprehension of the results. See Kästner, ii. 122.
It is published in an edition of Vitruvius, Strasburg, 1550.
[345] Tiraboschi. Montucla. Biogr. Univ.
SECT. III. 1460-1470.
_Progress of Art of Printing--Learning in Italy and rest of Europe._
|Progress of printing in Germany.|
30. The progress of that most important invention, which illustrated the
preceding ten years, is the chief subject of our consideration in the
present. Many books, it is to be observed, even of the superior class,
were printed, especially in the first thirty years after the invention
of the art, without date of time or place; and this was, of course, more
frequently the case with smaller or fugitive pieces. A catalogue,
therefore, of books that can be certainly referred to any particular
period must always be very defective. A collection of fables in German
was printed at Bamberg in 1461, and another book in 1462, by Pfister, at
the same place.[346] The Bible which bears his name has been already
mentioned. In 1462 Fust published a Bible, commonly called the Mentz
Bible, and which passed for the earliest till that in the Mazarin
library came to light. But in the same year, the city having been taken
by Adolphus count of Nassau, the press of Fust was broken up, and his
workmen, whom he had bound by an oath to secrecy, dispersed themselves
into different quarters. Released thus, as they seem to have thought,
from their obligation, they exercised their skill in other places. It is
certain, that the art of printing, soon after this, spread into the
towns near the Rhine; not only Bamberg, as before mentioned, but
Cologne, Strasburg, Augsburg, and one or two more places, sent forth
books before the conclusion of these ten years. Nor was Mentz altogether
idle, after the confusion occasioned by political events had abated. Yet
the whole number of books printed with dates of time and place, in the
German empire, from 1461 to 1470, according to Panzer, was only
twenty-four; of which five were Latin, and two German, Bibles. The only
known classical works are two editions of Cicero de Officiis, at Mentz,
in 1465 and 1466, and another about the latter year at Cologne, by Ulric
Zell; perhaps also the treatise de Finibus, and that de Senectute, at
the same place. There is also reason to suspect that a Virgil, a
Valerius Maximus, and a Terence, printed by Mentelin at Strasburg,
without a date, are as old as 1470; and the same has been thought of one
or two editions of Ovid de Arte Amandi, by Zell of Cologne. One book,
Joannis de Turrecremata Explanatio in Psalterium, was printed by Zainer,
at Cracow, in 1465. This is remarkable, as we have no evidence of the
Polish press from that time till 1500. Several copies of this book are
said to exist in Poland; yet doubts of its authenticity have been
entertained. Zainer settled soon afterwards at Augsburg.[347]
[346] Lambinet.
[347] Panzer, Annales Typographici. Biographie Universelle, Zainer.
|Introduced into France.|
31. It was in 1469 that Ulric Gering, with two more, who had been
employed as pressmen by Fust at Mentz, were induced by Fitchet and
Lapierre, rectors of the Sorbonne, to come to Paris, where several books
were printed in 1470 and 1471. The epistles of Gasparin of Barziza
appear, by some verses subjoined, to have been the earliest among
these.[348] Panzer has increased to eighteen the list of books printed
before the close of 1472.[349]
[348] The last four of these lines are the following:
Primos ecce libros quos hæc industria finxit,
Francorum in terris, ædibus atque tuis.
Michael, Udalricus, Martinusque magistri
Hos impresserunt, et facient alios.
[349] See Greswell’s Early Parisian Press.
|Caxton’s first works.|
32. But there seem to be unquestionable proofs that a still earlier
specimen of typography is due to an English printer, the famous Caxton.
His Recueil des Histoires de Troye appears to have been printed during
the life of Philip duke of Burgundy, and consequently before June 15,
1467. The place of publication, certainly within the duke’s dominions,
has not been conjectured. It is, therefore, by several years the
earliest printed book in the French language. A Latin speech by Russell,
ambassador of Edward IV. to Charles of Burgundy, in 1469, is the next
publication of Caxton. This was also printed in the Low Countries.[350]
[350] Dibdin’s Typographical Antiquities. This is not noticed in the
Biographie Universelle, nor in Brunet; an omission hardly excusable.
|Printing exercised in Italy.|
33. A more splendid scene was revealed in Italy. Sweynheim and Pannartz,
two workmen of Fust, set up a press, doubtless with encouragement and
patronage, at the monastery of Subiaco in the Apennines, a place
chosen either on account of the numerous manuscripts it contained, or
because the monks were of the German nation; and hence an edition of
Lactantius issued in October, 1465, which one, no longer extant, of
Donatus’s little grammar is said to have preceded. An edition of Cicero
de Officiis, without a date, is referred by some to the year 1466. In
1467, after printing Augustin de Civitate Dei, and Cicero de Oratore,
the two Germans left Subiaco for Rome, where they sent forth not less
than twenty-three editions of ancient Latin authors before the close of
1470. Another German, John of Spire, established a press at Venice, in
1469, beginning with Cicero’s Epistles. In that and the next year,
almost as many classical works were printed at Venice as at Rome, either
by John and his brother Vindelin, or by a Frenchman, Nicolas Jenson.
Instances are said to exist of books printed by unknown persons at
Milan, in 1469; and in 1470, Zarot, a German, opened there a fertile
source of typography, though but two Latin authors were published that
year. An edition of Cicero’s Epistles appeared also in the little town
of Foligno. The whole number of books that had issued from the press in
Italy at the close of that year amounts, according to Panzer, to
eighty-two; exclusive of those which have no date, some of which may be
referrible to this period.
|Lorenzo de’ Medici.|
34. Cosmo de’ Medici died in 1464. But the happy impulse he had given to
the restoration of letters was not suspended; and in the last year of
the present decade, his wealth and his influence over the republic of
Florence had devolved on a still more conspicuous character, his
grandson Lorenzo, himself worthy, by his literary merits, to have done
honour to any patron, had not a more prosperous fortune called him to
become one.
|Italian poetry of fifteenth century.|
35. The epoch of Lorenzo’s accession to power is distinguished by a
circumstance hardly less honourable than the restoration of classical
learning,--the revival of native genius in poetry, after the slumber of
near a hundred years. After the death of Petrarch, many wrote verses,
but none excelled in the art; though Muratori has praised the poetry
down to 1400, especially that of Guisto di Conti, whom he does not
hesitate to place among the first poets of Italy.[351] But that of the
fifteenth century is abandoned by all critics as rude, feeble, and ill
expressed. The historians of literature scarcely deign to mention a few
names, or the editors of selections to extract a few sonnets. The
romances of chivalry in rhyme, Buovo d’Antona, la Spagna, l’Ancroja, are
only deserving to be remembered as they led in some measure to the great
poems of Boiardo and Ariosto. In themselves they are mean and prosaic.
It is vain to seek a general cause for the sterility in the cultivation
of Latin and Greek literature, which we know did not obstruct the
brilliancy of Italian poetry in the next age. There is only one cause
for the want of great men in any period;--nature does not think fit to
produce them. They are no creatures of education and circumstance.
[351] Muratori della Perfetta Poesia, p. 193. Bouterwek, Gesch. der
Ital. Poesie. i. 216.
|Italian prose of same age.|
36. The Italian prose literature of this interval from the age of
Petrarch would be comprised in a few volumes. Some historical memoirs
may be found in Muratori, but far the chief part of his collection is in
Latin. Leonard Aretin wrote lives of Dante and Petrarch in Italian,
which, according to Corniani, are neither valuable for their information
nor for their style. The Vita Civile of Palmieri seems to have been
written some time after the middle of the fifteenth century; but of this
Corniani says, that having wished to give a specimen, on account of the
rarity of Italian in that age, he had abandoned his intention, finding
that it was hardly possible to read two sentences in the Vita Civile
without meeting some barbarism or incorrectness. The novelists
Sacchetti, and Ser Giovanni, author of the Pecorone, who belong to the
end of the fourteenth century, are read by some; their style is familiar
and idiomatic; but Crescimbeni praises that of the former. Corniani
bestows some praise on Passavanti and Pandolfini; the first a religious
writer, not much later than Boccaccio; the latter a noble Florentine,
author of a moral dialogue in the beginning of the fifteenth century.
Filelfo, among his voluminous productions, has an Italian commentary on
Petrarch, of which Corniani speaks very slightingly. The commentary of
Landino on Dante is much better esteemed; but it was not published till
1481.
|Giostra of Politian.|
37. It was on occasion of a tournament, wherein Lorenzo himself and his
brother Julian had appeared in the lists, that poems were composed by
Luigi Pulci, and by Politian, then a youth, or rather a boy, the latter
of which displayed more harmony, spirit, and imagination, than any that
had been written since the death of Petrarch.[352] It might thus
be seen, that there was no real incompatibility between the pursuits of
ancient literature and the popular language of fancy and sentiment; and
that, if one gave chastity and elegance of style, a more lively and
natural expression of the mind could best be attained by the other.
[352] Extracts from this poem will be found in Roscoe’s Lorenzo, and
in Sismondi, Littérature du Midi, ii. 43, who praises it highly, as
the Italian critics have done, and as by the passages quoted it
seems well to deserve. Roscoe supposes Politian to be only fourteen
years old when he wrote the Giostra di Giuliano. But the lines he
quotes allude to Lorenzo as chief of the republic, which could not
be said before the death of Pietro in December, 1469. If he wrote
them at sixteen, it is extraordinary enough; but these two years
make an immense difference. Ginguéné is of opinion, that they do
not allude to the tournament of 1468, but to one in 1473.
|Paul II. persecutes the learned.|
38. This period was not equally fortunate for the learned in other parts
of Italy. Ferdinand of Naples, who came to the throne in 1458, proved no
adequate representative of his father Alfonso. But at Rome they
encountered a serious calamity. A few zealous scholars, such as
Pomponius Lætus, Platina, Callimachus Experiens, formed an academy in
order to converse together on subjects of learning, and communicate to
each other the results of their private studies. Dictionaries, indexes,
and all works of compilation being very deficient, this was the best
substitute for the labour of perusing the whole body of Latin antiquity.
They took Roman names; an innocent folly, long after practised in
Europe. The pope, however, Paul II., thought fit, in 1468, to arrest all
this society on charges of conspiracy against his life, for which there
was certainly no foundation, and of setting up Pagan superstitions
against Christianity, of which, in this instance, there seems to have
been no proof. They were put to the torture, and kept in prison a
twelvemonth, when the tyrant, who is said to have vowed this in his
first rage, set them all at liberty; but it was long before the Roman
academy recovered any degree of vigour.[353]
[353] Tiraboschi, vi. 93. Ginguéné. Brucker. Corniani ii. 280. This
writer, inferior to none in his acquaintance with the literature of
the fifteenth century, but, though not an ecclesiastic, always
favourable to the court of Rome, seems to strive to lay the blame
on the imprudence of Platina.
|Mathias Corvinus.|
|His library.|
39. We do not discover as yet much substantial encouragement to
literature in any country on this side the Alps, with the exception of
one where it was least to be anticipated. Mathias Corvinus, king of
Hungary, from his accession in 1458 to his death in 1490, endeavoured to
collect round himself the learned of Italy, and to strike light into the
midst of the depths of darkness that encompassed his country. He
determined, therefore, to erect an university, which, by the original
plan, was to have been in a distinct city; but the Turkish wars
compelled him to fix it at Buda. He availed himself of the dispersion of
libraries, after the capture of Constantinople, to purchase Greek
manuscripts, and employed four transcribers at Florence, besides thirty
at Buda, to enrich his collection. Thus, at his death, it is said that
the royal library at Buda contained 50,000 volumes; a number that
appears wholly incredible.[354] Three hundred ancient statues are
reported to have been placed in the same repository. But when the city
fell into the hands of the Turks in 1527, these noble treasures were
dispersed, and in great measure destroyed. Though the number of books,
as is just observed, must have been exaggerated, it is possible that
neither the burning of the Alexandrian library by Omar, if it ever
occurred, nor any other single calamity recorded in history, except the
two captures of Constantinople itself, has been more fatally injurious
to literature; and, with due regard to the good intentions of Mathias
Corvinus, it is deeply to be regretted that the inestimable relics once
rescued from the barbarian Ottomans, should have been accumulated in a
situation of so little security against their devastating arms.[355]
[354] The library collected by Nicolas V. contained only 5,000
manuscripts. The volumes printed in Europe before the death of
Corvinus would probably be reckoned highly at 15,000. Heeren
suspects the number 50,000 to be hyperbolical; and in fact there
can be no doubt of it.
[355] Brucker. Roscoe. Gibbon. Heeren, p. 173, who refers to several
modern books expressly relating to the fate of this library. Part
of it, however, found its way to that of Vienna.
|Slight signs of literature in England.|
40. England under Edward IV. presents an appearance, in the annals of
publication, about as barren as under Edward the Confessor; there is, I
think, neither in Latin nor in English, a single book that we can refer
to this decennial period.[356] Yet we find a few symptoms, not to
be overlooked, of incipient regard for literature. Leland enumerates
some Englishmen who travelled to Italy, perhaps before 1460, in order to
become disciples of the younger Guarini at Ferrara: Robert Fleming,
William Gray, bishop of Ely, John Free, John Gunthorpe, and a very
accomplished nobleman, John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester. It is but
fairness to give credit to these men for their love of learning, and to
observe, that they preceded any whom we could mention on sure grounds
either in France or Germany. We trace, however, no distinct fruits from
their acquisitions. But, though very few had the means of attaining that
on which we set a high value in literature, the mere rudiments of
grammatical learning were communicated to many. Nor were munificent
patrons, testators, in the words of Burke, to a posterity which they
embraced as their own, wanting in this latter period of the middle ages.
William of Wykeham, chancellor of England under Richard II. and bishop
of Winchester, founded a school in that city, and a college at Oxford in
connection with it, in 1373.[357] Henry VI., in imitation of him, became
the founder of Eton school, and of King’s College, Cambridge, about
1442.[358] In each of these schools seventy boys, and in each college
seventy fellows and scholars, are maintained by these princely
endowments. It is unnecessary to observe, that they are still the
amplest, as they are much the earliest, foundations for the support of
grammatical learning in England. What could be taught in these, or any
other schools at this time, the reader has been enabled to judge; it
must have been the Latin language, through indifferent books of grammar,
and with the perusal of very few heathen writers of antiquity. In the
curious and unique collection of the Paston letters we find one from a
boy at Eton in 1468, wherein he gives two Latin verses, not very good,
of his own composition.[359] I am sensible that the mention of such a
circumstance may appear trifling, especially to foreigners: but it is
not a trifle to illustrate by any fact the gradual progress of knowledge
among the laity; first in the mere elements of reading and writing, as
we did in a former chapter; and now, in the fifteenth century, in such
grammatical instruction as could be imparted. This boy of the Paston
family was well born, and came from a distance; nor was he in training
for the church, since he seems by this letter to have had marriage in
contemplation.
[356] The University of Oxford, according to Wood, as well as the
church generally, stood very low about this time: the grammar
schools were laid aside; degrees were conferred on undeserving
persons for money. A.D. 1455, 1466. He had previously mentioned
those schools as kept up in the university under the
superintendence of masters of arts. A.D. 1442. The statutes of
Magdalen College, founded in the reign of Edward, provide for a
certain degree of learning.--Chandler’s Life of Waynflete, p. 200.
[357] Lowth’s Life of Wykeham. He permits in his statutes a limited
number of sons of gentlemen (gentilium) to be educated in his
school. Chandler’s Life of Waynflete, p. 5.
[358] Waynflete became the first head master of Eton in 1442. Chandler,
p. 26.
[359] Vol. i., p. 301. Of William Paston, author of these lines, it is
said, some years before, that he had “gone to school to a Lombard
called Karol Giles, to learn and to be read in poetry, or else in
French. He said, that he would be as glad and as fain of a good
book of French or of poetry as my master Falstaff would be to
purchase a fair manor,” p. 173. (1459).
|Paston letters.|
41. But the Paston letters are, in other respects, an important
testimony to the progressive condition of society; and come in as a
precious link in the chain of the moral history of England, which they
alone in this period supply. They stand indeed singly, as far as I know,
in Europe; for though it is highly probable that in the archives of
Italian families, if not in France or Germany, a series of merely
private letters equally ancient may be concealed, I do not recollect
that any have been published. They are all written in the reigns of
Henry VI., and Edward IV., except a few, that extend as far as Henry
VII., by different members of a wealthy and respectable, but not noble,
family; and are, therefore, pictures of the life of the English gentry
in that age.[360] We are merely concerned with their evidence as to the
state of literature. And this, upon the whole, is more favourable than,
from the want of authorship in those reigns, we should be led to
anticipate. It is plain that several members of the family, male and
female, wrote not only grammatically, but with a fluency and facility,
an epistolary expertness, which implies the habitual use of the pen.
Their expression is much less formal and quaint than that of modern
novelists, when they endeavour to feign the familiar style of ages much
later than the fifteenth century. Some of them mix Latin with their
English, very bad, and probably for the sake of concealment; and
Ovid is once mentioned as a book to be sent from one to another.[361] It
appears highly probable, that such a series of letters, with so much
vivacity and pertinence, would not have been written by any family of
English gentry in the reign of Richard II., and much less before. It is
hard to judge from a single case; but the letter of Lady Pelham, quoted
in the first chapter, is ungrammatical and unintelligible. The seed,
therefore, was now rapidly germinating beneath the ground; and thus we
may perceive that the publication of books is not the sole test of the
intellectual advance of a people. I may add, that although the middle of
the fifteenth century was the period in which the fewest books were
written, a greater number, in the opinion of experienced judges, were
transcribed in that than in any former age.
[360] This collection is in five quarto volumes, and has become scarce.
The length has been doubled by an injudicious proceeding of the
editor, in printing the original orthography and abbreviations of
the letters on each left-hand page, and a more legible modern form
on the right. As orthography is of little importance, and
abbreviations of none at all, it would have been sufficient to have
given a single specimen.
[361] “As to Ovid de Arte Amandi, I shall send him you next week, for I
have him not now ready.” iv. 175. This was between 1463 and 1469,
according to the editor. We do not know positively of any edition
of Ovid de Arte Amandi so early; but Zell of Cologne is supposed to
have printed one before 1470, as has been mentioned above. Whether
the book to be sent were in print, or manuscript, must be left to
the sagacity of critics.
|Low condition of public libraries.|
42. It may be observed here, with reference to the state of learning
generally in England down to the age immediately preceding the
Reformation, that Leland, in the fourth volume of his Collectanea, has
given several lists of books in colleges and monasteries, which do not
by any means warrant the supposition of a tolerable acquaintance with
ancient literature. We find, however, some of the recent translations
made in Italy from Greek authors. The clergy, in fact, were now
retrograding, while the laity were advancing; and when this was the
case, the ascendency of the former was near its end.
|Rowley.|
|Clotilde de Surville.|
43. I have said that there was not a new book written within these ten
years. In the days of our fathers, it would have been necessary at least
to mention as a forgery the celebrated poems attributed to Thomas
Rowley. But, probably, no one person living believes in their
authenticity; nor should I have alluded to so palpable a fabrication at
all, but for the curious circumstance that a very similar trial of
literary credulity has not long since been essayed in France. A
gentleman of the name of Surville published a collection of poems,
alleged to have been written by Clotilde de Surville, a poetess of the
fifteenth century. The muse of the Ardèche warbled her notes during a
longer life than the monk of Bristow; and having sung the relief of
Orleans by the Maid of Arc in 1429, lived to pour her swan-like chant on
the battle of Fornova in 1495. Love, however, as much as war, is her
theme; and it was a remarkable felicity that she rendered an ode of her
prototype Sappho into French verse, many years before any one else in
France could have seen it. But having, like Rowley, anticipated too much
the style and sentiments of a later period, she has, like him, fallen
into the numerous ranks of the dead who never were alive.[362]
[362] Auguis, Recueil des Poètes, vol. ii. Biogr. Univ., Surville.
Villemain, Cours de Littérature, vol. ii. Sismondi, Hist. des
Français, xiii. 593. The forgery is by no means so gross as that of
Chatterton; but, as M. Sismondi says, “We have only to compare
Clotilde with the Duke of Orleans, or Villon.” The following lines,
quoted by him, will give the reader a fair specimen:--
Suivons l’amour, tel en soit le danger;
Cy nous attend sur lits charmans de mousse.
A des rigueurs; qui voudroit s’en venger?
Qui (meme alors que tout désir s’émousse)
Au prix fatal de ne plus y songer?
Règne sur moi, cher tyran, dont les armes
Ne me sauroient porter coups trop puissans!
Pour m’epargner n’en crois onc a mes larmes;
Sont de plaisir, tant plus auront de charmes
Tes dards aigus, que seront plus cuisans.
It has been justly remarked, that the extracts from Clotilde in the
Recueil des Anciens Poètes occupy too much space, while the genuine
writers of the fifteenth century appear in very scanty specimens.
SECT. IV. 1471-1480.
_The same Subjects continued--Lorenzo de’ Medici--Physical
Controversy--Mathematical Sciences._
|Number of books printed in Italy.|
44. The books printed in Italy during these ten years amount, according
to Panzer, to 1297; of which 234 are editions of ancient classical
authors. Books without date are of course not included; and the list
must not be reckoned complete as to others.
45. A press was established at Florence by Lorenzo, in which Cennini, a
goldsmith, was employed; the first printer, except Caxton and Jenson,
who was not a German. Virgil was published in 1471. Several other
Italian cities began to print in this period. The first edition of Dante
issued from Foligno in 1472; it has been improbably, as well as
erroneously, referred to Mentz. Petrarch had been published in 1470, and
Boccace in 1471. They were reprinted several times before the close of
this decade.
|First Greek printed.|
46. No one had attempted to cast Greek types in sufficient number for an
entire book; though a few occur in the early publications by Sweynheim
and Pannartz;[363] while in those printed afterwards at Venice, Greek
words are inserted by the pen; till, in 1476, Zarot of Milan had the
honour of giving the Greek grammar of Constantine Lascaris to the
world.[364] This was followed in 1480 by Craston’s lexicon, a very
imperfect vocabulary; but which for many years continued to be the only
assistance of the kind to which a student could have recourse. The
author was an Italian.
[363] Greek types first appear in a treatise of Jerome, printed at Rome
in 1468. Heeren, from Panzer.
[364] Lascaris Grammatica Græca, Mediolani ex recognitione Demetrii
Cretensis per Dionysium Paravisinum, 4to. The characters in this
rare volume are elegant and of a moderate size. The earliest
specimens of Greek printing consist of detached passages and
citations, found in a very few of the first printed copies of Latin
authors, such as the Lactantius of 1465, the Aulus Gellius and
Apuleius of Sweynheim and Pannartz, 1469, and some works of
Bessarion about the same time. In all these it is remarkable that
the Greek typography is legibly and creditably executed, whereas
the Greek introduced into the Officia et Paradoxa of Cicero, Milan,
1474, by Zarot, is so deformed as to be scarcely legible. I am
indebted for the whole of this note to Greswell’s Early Parisian
Greek Press, i. 1.
|Study of antiquities.|
47. Ancient learning is to be divided into two great departments; the
knowledge of what is contained in the works of Greek and Roman authors,
and that of the matériel, if I may use the word, which has been
preserved in a bodily shape, and is sometimes known by the name of
antiquities. Such are buildings, monuments, inscriptions, coins, medals,
vases, instruments, which by gradual accumulation have thrown a powerful
light upon ancient history and literature. The abundant riches of Italy
in these remains could not be overlooked as soon as the spirit of
admiration for all that was Roman began to be kindled. Petrarch himself
formed a little collection of coins; and his contemporary Pastrengo was
the first who copied inscriptions; but in the early part of the
fifteenth century, her scholars and her patrons of letters began to
collect the scattered relics, which almost every region presented to
them.[365] Niccolo Niccolì, according to the funeral oration of Poggio,
possessed a series of medals, and even wrote a treatise in Italian,
correcting the common orthography of Latin words, on the authority of
inscriptions and coins. The love of collections increased from this
time; the Medici and other rich patrons of letters spared no expense in
accumulating these treasures of the antiquary. Ciriacus of Ancona, about
1440, travelled into the East in order to copy inscriptions; but he was
naturally exposed to deceive himself and to be deceived; nor has he
escaped the suspicion of imposture, or at least of excessive
credulity.[366]
[365] Tiraboschi, vols. v. and vi. Andrès, ix. 196.
[366] Tiraboschi. Andrès, ix. 199. Ciriaco has not wanted advocates;
some of the inscriptions he was accused of having forged have
turned out to be authentic; and it is presumed in his favour, that
others which do not appear may have perished since his time. Biogr.
Univ., Cyriaque. One that rests on his authority is that which is
supposed to record the persecution of the Christians in Spain under
Nero. See Lardner’s Jewish and Heathen Testimonies, vol. i, who,
though by no means a credulous critic, inclines to its genuineness.
|Works on that subject.|
48. The first who made his researches of this kind collectively known
to the world, was Biondo Flavio, or Flavio Biondo,--for the names may
be found in a different order, but more correctly in the
first,[367]--secretary to Eugenius IV., and to his successors. His long
residence at Rome inspired him with the desire, and gave him the
opportunity, of describing her imperial ruins. In a work, dedicated to
Eugenius IV., who died in 1447, but not printed till 1471, entitled,
Romæ Instauratæ libri tres, he describes, examines, and explains by the
testimonies of ancient authors, the numerous monuments of Rome. In
another, Romæ Triumphantis libri decem, printed about 1472, he treats of
the government, laws, religion, ceremonies, military discipline, and
other antiquities of the republic. A third work, compiled at the request
of Alfonso, king of Naples, and printed in 1474, called Italia
Illustrata, contains a description of all Italy, divided into its
ancient fourteen regions. Though Biondo Flavio was almost the first to
hew his way into the rock, which should cause his memory to be
respected, it has naturally happened, that, his works being imperfect
and faulty, in comparison with those of the great antiquaries of the
sixteenth century, they have not found a place in the collection of
Grævius, and are hardly remembered by name.[368]
[367] Zeno, Dissertazioni Vossiane, i. 229.
[368] A superior treatise of the same age on the antiquities of the
Roman city is by Bernard Rucellai (de Urbe Româ, in Rer. Ital.
Scrip. Florent., vol. ii.). But it was not published before the
eighteenth century. Rucellai wrote some historical works in a very
good Latin style, and was distinguished also in the political
revolutions of Florence. After the death of Lorenzo, he became the
protector of the Florentine academy, for the members of which he
built a palace with gardens. Corniani, iii. 143. Biogr. Univ.,
Rucellai.
|Publications in Germany.|
49. In Germany and the Low Countries the art of printing began to be
exercised at Deventer, Utrecht, Louvain, Basle, Ulm, and other places,
and in Hungary at Buda. We find, however, very few ancient writers; the
whole list of what can pass for classics being about thirteen. One or
two editions of parts of Aristotle in Latin, from translations lately
made in Italy, may be added. Yet it was not the length of manuscripts
that discouraged the German printers; for besides their editions of the
Scriptures, Mentelin of Strasburg published, in 1473, the great
encyclopædia of Vincent of Beauvais, in ten volumes folio, generally
bound in four; and, in 1474, a similar work of Berchorius, or
Berchœur, in three other folios. The contrast between these labours
and those of his Italian contemporaries is very striking.
|In France.|
50. Florus and Sallust were printed at Paris early in this decade, and
twelve more classical authors at the same place before its termination.
An edition of Cicero ad Herennium appeared at Angers in 1476, and one of
Horace at Caen, in 1480. The press of Lyons also sent forth several
works, but none of them classical. It has been said by French writers,
that the first book printed in their language is Le Jardin de Dévotion,
by Colard Mansion of Bruges, in 1473. This date has been questioned in
England; but it is of the less importance, as we have already seen that
Caxton’s Recueil des Histoires de Troye has the clear priority. Le Roman
de Baudouin comte de Flandres, Lyon, 1474, seems to be the earliest
French book printed in France. In 1476, Les Grands Chroniques de St.
Denis, an important and bulky volume, appeared at Paris.
|In England, by Caxton.|
51. We come now to our own Caxton, who finished a translation into
English of his Recueil des Histoires de Troye, by order of Margaret,
duchess of Burgundy, at Cologne, in September 1471. It was probably
printed there the next year.[369] But soon afterwards he came to England
with the instruments of his art; and in 1474, his Game of Chess, a
slight and short performance, is supposed to have been the first
specimen of English typography.[370] In almost every year from this time
to his death in 1483, Caxton continued to publish those volumes which
are the delight of our collectors. The earliest of his editions bearing
a date in England, is the “Dictes and Sayings,” a translation by Lord
Rivers from a Latin compilation, and published in 1477. In a literary
history it should be observed, that the Caxton publications are more
adapted to the general than the learned reader, and indicate, upon the
whole, but a low state of knowledge in England. A Latin translation,
however, of Aristotle’s ethics was printed at Oxford in 1479.
[369] This book at the Duke of Roxburgh’s famous sale brought 1060_l._
[370] The Expositio Sancti Hieronymi, of which a copy, in the public
library at Cambridge, bears the date of Oxford 1468 on the
title-page, is now generally given up. It has been successfully
contended by Middleton, and lately by Mr. Singer, that this date
should be 1478; the numeral letter x having been casually omitted.
Several similar instances occur, in which a pretended early book
has not stood the keen eye of criticism: as the Decor Puellarum
ascribed to Nicolas Jenson of Venice in 1461, for which we should
read 1471; a cosmography of Ptolemy with the date of 1462; a book
appearing to have been printed at Tours in 1467, &c.
|In Spain.|
52. The first book printed in Spain was on the very subject we might
expect to precede all others, the Conception of the Virgin. It should be
a very curious volume, being a poetical contest, on that sublime theme,
by thirty-six poets, four of whom had written in Spanish, one in
Italian, and the rest in Provençal or Valencian. It appeared at Valencia
in 1474. A little book on grammar followed in 1475, and Sallust was
printed the same year. In that year printing was also introduced at
Barcelona and Saragossa, in 1476 at Seville, in 1480 at Salamanca and
Burgos.
|Translations of Scripture.|
53. A translation of the Bible by Malerbi, a Venetian, was published in
1471, and two other editions of that, or a different version, the same
year. Eleven editions are enumerated by Panzer in the fifteenth century.
The German translation has already been mentioned; it was several times
reprinted in this decade; one in Dutch appeared in 1477, one in the
Valencian language, at that city, in 1478;[371] the New Testament
was printed in Bohemian, 1475, and in French, 1477; the earliest French
translation of the Old Testament seems to be about the same date. The
reader will of course understand, that all these translations were made
from the Vulgate Latin. It may naturally seem remarkable, that not only
at this period, but down to the Reformation, no attempt was made to
render any part of the Scriptures public in English. But, in fact, the
ground was thought too dangerous by those in power. The translation of
Wicliffe had taught the people some comparisons between the worldly
condition of the first preachers of Christianity and their successors,
as well as some other contrasts, which it was more expedient to avoid.
Long before the invention of printing it was enacted, in 1408, by a
constitution of Archbishop Arundel, in convocation, that no one should
thereafter “translate any text of Holy Scripture into English, by way of
a book, or little book or tract; and that no book should be read that
was composed lately in the time of John Wicliffe, or since his death.”
Scarcely any of Caxton’s publications are of a religious nature.
[371] This edition was suppressed or destroyed; no copy is known to
exist; but there is preserved a final leaf containing the names of
the translator and printer. M’Crie’s Reformation in Spain, p. 192.
Andrès says (xix. 154), that this translation was made early in the
fifteenth century, with the approbation of divines.
|Revival of literature in Spain.|
54. It would have been strange if Spain, placed on the genial shores of
the Mediterranean, and intimately connected through the Aragonese kings
with Italy, had not received some light from that which began to shine
so brightly. Her progress, however, in letters was but slow. Not but
that several individuals are named by compilers of literary biography in
the first part of the fifteenth century, as well as earlier, who are
reputed to have possessed a knowledge of languages, and to have stood at
least far above their contemporaries. Alfonsus Tostatus passes for the
most considerable; his writings are chiefly theological, but Andrès
praises his commentary on the Chronicle of Eusebius, at least as a bold
essay.[372] He contends that learning was not deficient in Spain during
the fifteenth century, though admitting that the rapid improvements made
at its close, and about the beginning of the next age, were due to
Lebrixa’s public instructions at Seville and Salamanca. Several
translations were made from Latin authors into Spanish, which, however,
is not of itself any great proof of Peninsular learning. The men to whom
Spain chiefly owes the advancement of useful learning, and who should
not be defrauded of their glory, were Arias Barbosa, a scholar of
Politian, and the more renowned, though not more learned or more early
propagator of Grecian literature, Antonio of Lebrixa, whose name was
latinised into Nebrissensis, by which he is commonly known. Of Arias,
who unaccountably has no place in the Biographie Universelle, Nicolas
Antonio gives a very high character.[373] He taught the Greek language
at Salamanca probably about this time. But his writings are not at all
numerous. For Lebrixa, instead of compiling from other sources, I shall
transcribe what Dr. M’Crie has said with his usual perspicuous brevity.
[372] ix. 151.
[373] In quo Antonium Nebrissensem socium habuit, qui tamen quicquid
usquam Græcarum literarum apud Hispanos esset, ab uno Aria emanâsse
in præfatione suarum Introductionum Grammaticarum ingenue
affirmavit. His duobus amplissimum illud gymnasium, indeque
Hispania tota debet barbariei, quæ longo apud nos bellorum dominatu
in immensum creverat, extirpationem, bonarumque omnium
disciplinarum divitias. Quas Arias noster ex antiquitatis penu per
vicennium integrum auditoribus suis larga et locuplete vena
communicavit, in poetica facultate Græcanicaque doctrina
Nebrissense melior, a quo tamen in varia multiplicique doctrina
superabatur. Bibl. Vetus.
|Character of Lebrixa.|
55. “Lebrixa, usually styled Nebrissensis, became to Spain what Valla
was to Italy, Erasmus to Germany, or Budæus to France. After a residence
of ten years in Italy, during which he had stored his mind with various
kinds of knowledge, he returned home, in 1473, by the advice of the
younger Philelphus and Hermolaus Barbarus, with the view of promoting
classical literature in his native country. Hitherto the revival of
letters in Spain was confined to a few inquisitive individuals, and had
not reached the schools and universities, whose teachers continued to
teach a barbarous jargon under the name of Latin, into which they
initiated the youth by means of a rude system of grammar, rendered
unintelligible, in some instances, by a preposterous intermixture of the
most abstruse questions in metaphysics. By the lectures which he read in
the universities of Seville, Salamanca, and Alcala, and by the
institutes which he published on Castilian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew
grammar, Lebrixa contributed in a wonderful degree to expel barbarism
from the seats of education, and to diffuse a taste for elegant and
useful studies among his countrymen. His improvements were warmly
opposed by the monks, who had engrossed the art of teaching, and
who, unable to bear the light themselves, wished to prevent all others
from seeing it; but, enjoying the support of persons of high authority,
he disregarded their selfish and ignorant outcries. Lebrixa continued to
an advanced age to support the literary reputation of his native
country.”[374]
[374] M’Crie’s Hist. of Reformation in Spain, p. 61. It is probable
that Lebrixa’s exertions were not very effectual in the present
decennium, nor perhaps in the next, but his Institutiones
Grammaticæ, a very scarce book, were printed at Seville in 1481.
|Library of Lorenzo.|
56. This was the brilliant æra of Florence, under the supremacy of
Lorenzo de’ Medici. The reader is probably well acquainted with this
eminent character, by means of a work of extensive and merited
reputation. The Laurentian library, still consisting wholly of
manuscripts, though formed by Cosmo, and enlarged by his son Pietro,
owed not only its name, but an ample increase of its treasures, to
Lorenzo, who swept the monasteries of Greece through his learned agent,
John Lascaris. With that true love of letters which scorns the
monopolising spirit of possession, Lorenzo permitted his manuscripts to
be freely copied for the use of other parts of Europe.
|Classics corrected and explained.|
57. It was an important labour of the learned at Florence to correct, as
well as elucidate, the text of their manuscripts, written generally by
ignorant and careless monks, or trading copyists (though the latter
probably had not much concern with ancient writers), and become almost
wholly unintelligible through the blunders of these transcribers.[375]
Landino, Merula, Calderino, and Politian were the most indefatigable in
this line of criticism during the age of Lorenzo. Before the use of
printing fixed the text of a whole edition--one of the most important of
its consequences--the critical amendments of these scholars could only
be made useful through their oral lectures. And these appear frequently
to have been the foundation of the valuable, though rather prolix,
commentaries we find in the old editions. Thus those of Landino
accompany many editions of Horace and Virgil, forming, in some measure,
the basis of all interpretative annotations on those poets. Landino in
these seldom touches on verbal criticism; but his explanations display a
considerable reach of knowledge. They are founded, as Heeren is
convinced, on his lectures, and consequently give us some notion of the
tone of instruction. In explaining the poets, two methods were pursued,
the grammatical and the moral, the latter of which consisted in
resolving the whole sense into allegory. Dante had given credit to a
doctrine, orthodox in this age, and long afterwards, that every great
poem must have a hidden meaning.[376]
[375] Meiners, Vergleich. der Sitten, iii. 108. Heeren, p. 293.
[376] Heeren, pp. 241, 287.
|Character of Lorenzo.|
58. The notes of Calderino, a scholar of high fame, but infected with
the common vice of arrogance, are found with those of Landino in the
early editions of Virgil and Horace. Regio commented upon Ovid,
Omnibonus Leonicenus upon Lucan, both these upon Quintilian, many upon
Cicero.[377] It may be observed, for the sake of chronological
exactness, that these labours are by no means confined, even
principally, to this decennial period. They are mentioned in connection
with the name of Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose influence over literature
extended from 1470 to his death in 1492. Nor was mere philology the
sole, or the leading, pursuit to which so truly noble a mind accorded
its encouragement. He sought in ancient learning something more elevated
than the narrow, though necessary, researches of criticism. In a villa
overhanging the towers of Florence, on the steep slope of that lofty
hill crowned by the mother city, the ancient Fiesole, in gardens which
Tully might have envied, with Ficino, Landino, and Politian at his side,
he delighted his hours of leisure with the beautiful visions of Platonic
philosophy, for which the summer stillness of an Italian sky appears the
most congenial accompaniment.
[377] Id. 297.
|Prospect from his villa at Fiesole.|
59. Never could the sympathies of the soul with outward nature be more
finely touched; never could more striking suggestions be presented to
the philosopher and the statesman. Florence lay beneath them; not with
all the magnificence that the later Medici have given her, but, thanks
to the piety of former times, presenting almost as varied an outline to
the sky. One man, the wonder of Cosmo’s age, Brunelleschi, had crowned
the beautiful city with the vast dome of its cathedral; a structure
unthought of in Italy before, and rarely since surpassed. It seemed,
amidst clustering towers of inferior churches, an emblem of the Catholic
hierarchy under its supreme head; like Rome itself, imposing, unbroken,
unchangeable, radiating in equal expansion to every part of the earth,
and directing its convergent curves to heaven. Round this were
numbered, at unequal heights, the Baptistery, with its gates worthy of
Paradise; the tall and richly decorated belfry of Giotto; the church of
the Carmine, with the frescos of Masaccio; those of Santa Maria Novella,
beautiful as a bride, of Santa Croce, second only in magnificence to the
cathedral, and of St. Mark; the San Spirito, another great monument of
the genius of Brunelleschi; the numerous convents that rose within the
walls of Florence, or were scattered immediately about them. From these
the eye might turn to the trophies of a republican government that was
rapidly giving way before the citizen-prince who now surveyed them; the
Palazzo Vecchio, in which the signiory of Florence held their councils,
raised by the Guelf aristocracy, the exclusive, but not tyrannous
faction that long swayed the city; or the new and unfinished palace
which Brunelleschi had designed for one of the Pitti family, before they
fell, as others had already done, in the fruitless struggle against the
house of Medici; itself destined to become the abode of the victorious
race, and to perpetuate, by retaining its name, the revolutions that had
raised them to power.
60. The prospect, from an elevation, of a great city in its silence, is
one of the most impressive, as well as beautiful, we ever behold. But
far more must it have brought home thoughts of seriousness to the mind
of one who, by the force of events, and the generous ambition of his
family, and his own, was involved in the dangerous necessity of
governing without the right, and, as far as might be, without the
semblance of power; one who knew the vindictive and unscrupulous
hostility which, at home and abroad, he had to encounter. If thoughts
like these could bring a cloud over the brow of Lorenzo, unfit for the
object he sought in that retreat, he might restore its serenity by other
scenes which his garden commanded. Mountains bright with various hues,
and clothed with wood, bounded the horizon, and, on most sides, at no
great distance; but embosomed in these were other villas and domains of
his own; while the level country bore witness to his agricultural
improvements, the classic diversion of a statesman’s cares. The same
curious spirit which led him to fill his garden at Careggi with exotic
flowers of the east, the first instance of a botanical collection in
Europe, had introduced a new animal from the same regions. Herds of
buffaloes, since naturalised in Italy, whose dingy hide, bent neck,
curved horns, and lowering aspect, contrasted with the greyish hue and
full mild eye of the Tuscan oxen, pastured in the valley, down which the
yellow Arno steals silently through its long reaches to the sea.[378]
[378]
Taliâ Fæsuleo lentus meditabar in antro,
Rure suburbano Medicum, qua mons sacer urbem
Mæoniam, longique volumina despicit Arni:
Qua bonus hospitium felix placidamque quietem
Indulget Laurens.
_Politiani Rusticus._
And let us from the top of Fiesole,
Whence Galileo’s glass by night observed
The phases of the moon, look round below
On Arno’s vale, where the dove-coloured steer
Is ploughing up and down among the vines,
While many a careless note is sung aloud,
Filling the air with sweetness--and on thee,
Beautiful Florence, all within thy walls,
Thy groves and gardens, pinnacles and towers,
Drawn to our feet.
It is hardly necessary to say that these lines are taken from my
friend Mr. Rogers’s Italy, a poem full of moral and descriptive
sweetness, and written in the chastened tone of fine taste. With
respect to the buffaloes, I have no other authority than these
lines of Politian, in his poem of Ambra, on the farm of Lorenzo at
Poggio Cajano.
Atque aliud nigris missum, quis credat? ab Indis,
Ruminat insuetas armentum discolor herbas.
But I must own, that Buffon tells us, though without quoting any
authority, that the buffalo was introduced into Italy as early as
the seventh century. I did not take the trouble of consulting
Aldrovandus, who would perhaps have confirmed him--especially as I
have a better opinion of my readers than to suppose they would care
about the matter.
|Platonic academy.|