27. It is not impossible, that some offence will be taken at this

character of his works by those who have thought only of the man;

extraordinary as he doubtless was in himself, and far more so as the

instrument of mighty changes on the earth. Many of late years,

especially in Germany, without holding a single one of Luther’s more

peculiar tenets, have thought it necessary to magnify his intellectual

gifts. Frederic Schlegel is among these; but in his panegyric there

seems a little wish to insinuate, that the reformer’s powerful

understanding had a taint of insanity. This has not unnaturally occurred

to others, from the strange tales of diabolical visions Luther very

seriously recounts, and from the inconsistencies as well as the

extravagance of some passages. But the total absence of self-restraint,

with the intoxicating effects of presumptuousness, is sufficient to

account for aberrations, which men of regular minds construe into actual

madness. Whether Luther were perfectly in earnest as to his personal

interviews with the devil, may be doubtful; one of them he seems to

represent as internal.

|Theological writings. Erasmus.|

28. Very little of theological literature, published between 1520 and

1550, except such as bore immediately on the great controversies of the

age, has obtained sufficient reputation to come within our researches,

which, upon this most extensive portion of ancient libraries, do not

extend to disturb the slumbers of forgotten folios. The paraphrase of

Erasmus was the most distinguished work in scriptural interpretation.

Though not satisfactory to the violent of either party, it obtained the

remarkable honour of being adopted in the infancy of our own

protestantism. Every parish church in England, by an order of council in

1547, was obliged to have a copy of this paraphrase. It is probable, or

rather obviously certain, that this order was not complied with.[707]

[707] Jortin says that, “taking the Annotations and the Paraphrase of

Erasmus together, we have an interpretation of the New Testament as

judicious and exact as could be made in his time, and to which very

few deserve to be preferred of those which have since been

published.” ii. 91.

|Melanchthon. Romish writers.|

29. The Loci Communes of Melanchthon have already been mentioned. The

writings of Zwingle, collectively published in 1544, did not attain

equal reputation; with more of natural ability than erudition, he was

left behind in the general advance of learning. Calvin stands on higher

ground. His Institutes are still in the hands of that numerous body who

are usually denominated from him. The works of less conspicuous

advocates of the Reformation, which may fall within this earlier period

of controversy, will not detain us; nor is it worth while to do

more on this occasion than mention the names of a few once celebrated

men in the communion of Rome, Vives, Cajetan, Melchior Cano, Soto, and

Catharin.[708] The two latter were prominent in the council of Trent,

the first being of the Dominican party, or that of Thomas Aquinas, which

was virtually that of Augustin; the second a Scotist, and in some points

deviating a little from what passed for the more orthodox tenets either

in the catholic or protestant churches.[709]

[708] Eichhorn, vi. 210-226. Andrès, xviii. 236.

[709] Sarpi and Fleury, passim.

|This literature nearly forgotten.|

30. These elder champions of a long war, especially the Romish, are,

with a very few exceptions, known only by their names and lives. These

are they, and many more there were down to the middle of the seventeenth

century, at whom, along the shelves of an ancient library, we look and

pass by. They belong no more to man, but to the worm, the moth, and the

spider. Their dark and ribbed backs, their yellow leaves, their thousand

folio pages, do not more repel us than the unprofitableness of their

substance. Their prolixity, their barbarous style, the perpetual

recurrence, in many, of syllogistic forms, the reliance, by way of

proof, on authorities that have been abjured, the temporary and partial

disputes, which can be neither interesting nor always intelligible at

present, must soon put an end to the activity of the most industrious

scholar.[710] Even the coryphæi of the Reformation are probably more

quoted than read, more praised than appreciated; their works, though not

scarce, are voluminous and expensive; and it may not be invidious to

surmise, that Luther and Melanchthon serve little other purpose, at

least in England, than to give an occasional air of erudition to a

theological paragraph, or to supply its margin with a reference that few

readers will verify. It will be unnecessary to repeat this remark

hereafter; but it must be understood as applicable, with such few

exceptions as will from time to time appear, throughout at least the

remainder of the sixteenth century.

[710] Eichhorn.

|Sermons.|

31. No English treatise on a theological subject, published before the

end of 1550, seems to deserve notice in the general literature of

Europe, though some may be reckoned interesting in the history of our

Reformation. The sermons of Latimer, however, published in 1548, are

read for their honest zeal and lively delineation of manners. They are

probably the best specimens of a style then prevalent in the pulpit, and

which is still not lost in Italy, nor among some of our own sectaries; a

style that came at once home to the vulgar, animated and effective,

picturesque and intelligible, but too unsparing both of ludicrous

associations and commonplace invective. The French have some preachers,

earlier than Latimer, whose great fame was obtained in this manner,

Maillard and Menot. They belong to the reign of Louis XII. I am but

slightly acquainted with the former, whose sermons, printed if not

preached in Latin, with sometimes a sort of almost macaronic

intermixture of French, appeared to me very much inferior to those of

Latimer. Henry Stephens, in his Apologie pour Herodote, has culled many

passages from these preachers, in proof of the depravity of morals in

the age before the Reformation. In the little I have read of Maillard, I

did not find many ridiculous, though some injudicious passages; but

those who refer to the extracts of Niceron, both from him and Menot,

will have as much gratification, as consummate impropriety and bad taste

can furnish.[711]

[711] Niceron, vols. xxiii. and xxiv. If these are the original

sermons, it must have been the practice in France, as it was in

Italy, to preach in Latin; but Eichhorn tells us that the sermons

of the fifteenth century, published in Germany, were chiefly

translated from the mother tongue. vi. 113. Tauler certainly

preached in German, yet Eichhorn in another place (iii. 282), seems

to represent Luther and his protestant associates as the first who

used that language in the pulpit.

|Spirit of the Reformation.|

32. The vital spirit of the Reformation, as a great working in the

public mind, will be inadequately discerned in the theological writings

of this age. Two controversies overspread their pages, and almost efface

more important and more obvious differences between the old and the new

religions. Among the Lutherans, the tenet of justification or salvation

by faith alone, called, in the barbarous jargon of polemics,

solifidianism, was always prominent: it was from that point their

founder began; it was there that, long afterwards, and when its original

crudeness had been mellowed, Melanchthon himself thought the whole

principle of the contest was grounded.[712] In the disputes again of the

Lutherans with the Helvetic reformers, as well as in those of the latter

school, including the church of England, with that of Rome, the corporal

or real presence (which are synonymous with the writers of that

century) in the Lord’s supper was the leading topic of debate. But in

the former of these doctrines, after it had been purged from the

Antinomian extravagances of Luther, there was found, if not absolutely a

verbal, yet rather a subtle, and by no means practical, difference

between themselves and the church of Rome;[713] while, in the

Eucharistic controversy, many of the reformers bewildered themselves,

and strove to perplex their antagonists, with incompatible and

unintelligible propositions, to which the mass of the people paid as

little regard as they deserved. It was not for these trials of

metaphysical acuteness that the ancient cathedrals shook in their inmost

shrines; and though it would be very erroneous to deny, that many not

merely of the learned laity, but of the inferior ranks, were apt to

tread in such thorny paths, we must look to what came closer to the

apprehension of plain men for their zeal in the cause of reformed

religion, and for the success of that zeal. The abolition of

saint-worship, the destruction of images, the sweeping away of

ceremonies, of absolutions, of fasts and penances, the free circulation

of the Scriptures, the communion in prayer by the native tongue, the

introduction, if not of a good, yet of a more energetic and attractive

style of preaching than had existed before; and besides this, the

eradication of monkery which they despised, the humiliation of

ecclesiastical power which they hated, the immunity from exactions which

they resented, these are what the north of Europe deemed its gain by the

public establishment of the Reformation, and to which the common name of

protestantism was given. But it is rather in the history, than in the

strictly theological literature of this period, that we are to seek for

the character of that revolution in religious sentiment, which ought to

interest us from its own importance, and from its analogy to other

changes in human opinion.

[712] Melanchth. Epist. p. 290. ed. Peucer, 1570.

[713] Burnet on eleventh article.

|Limits of private judgment.|

33. It is often said, that the essential principle of protestantism, and

that for which the struggle was made, was something different from all

we have mentioned, a perpetual freedom from all authority in religious

belief, or what goes by the name of the right of private judgment. But,

to look more nearly at what occurred, this permanent independence was

not much asserted and still less acted upon. The Reformation was a

change of masters; a voluntary one, no doubt, in those who had any

choice; and in this sense, an exercise, for the time, of their personal

judgment. But no one having gone over to the confession of Augsburg, or

that of Zurich, was deemed at liberty to modify those creeds at his

pleasure. He might of course become an Anabaptist or an Arian; but he

was not the less a heretic in doing so, than if he had continued in the

church of Rome. By what light a protestant was to steer, might be a

problem which at that time, as ever since, it would perplex a theologian

to decide; but in practice, the law of the land, which established one

exclusive mode of faith was the only safe, as, in ordinary

circumstances, it was, upon the whole, the most eligible guide.

|Passions instrumental in Reformation.|

34. The adherents to the church of Rome have never failed to cast two

reproaches on those who left them: one, that the reform was brought

about by intemperate and calumnious abuse, by outrages of an excited

populace, or by the tyranny of princes; the other, that after

stimulating the most ignorant to reject the authority of their church,

it instantly withdrew this liberty of judgment, and devoted all who

presumed to swerve from the line drawn by law, to virulent obloquy, or

sometimes to bonds and death. These reproaches, it may be a shame for us

to own, “can be uttered, and cannot be refuted.” But, without

extenuating what is morally wrong, it is permitted to observe that the

protestant religion could, in our human view of consequences, have been

established by no other means. Those who act by calm reason are always

so few in number, and often so undeterminate in purpose, that without

the aid of passion and folly, no great revolution can be brought about.

A persuasion of some entire falsehood, in which every circumstance

converges to the same effect on the mind; an exaggerated belief of good

or evil disposition in others; a universal inference peremptorily

derived from some particular case; these are what sway mankind, not the

simple truth, with all its limits and explanations, the fair partition

of praise and blame, or the measured assent to probability that excludes

not hesitation. That condition of the heart and understanding which

renders men cautious in their judgment, and scrupulous in their

dealings, unfits them for revolutionary seasons. But of this temper

there is never much in the public. The people love to be told that they

can judge; but they are conscious that they can act. Whether a saint in

sculpture ought to stand in the niches of their cathedrals, it was

equally tedious and difficult to inquire; that he could be defaced, was

certain; and this was achieved. It is easy to censure this as

precipitancy; but it was not a mere act of the moment; it was, and much

more was of the same kind, the share that fell naturally to the

multitude in a work which they were called to fulfil, and for which they

sometimes encountered no slight danger.

|Establishment of new dogmatism.|

35. But, if it were necessary, in the outset of the Reformation, to make

use of that democratic spirit of destruction, by which the populace

answered to the bidding of Carlostadt or of Knox, if the artizans of

Germany and Switzerland were to be made arbiters of controversy, it was

not desirable that this reign of religious anarchy should be more than

temporary. Protestantism, whatever, from the generality of the word, it

may since be considered, was a positive creed; more distinctly so in the

Lutheran than in the Helvetic churches, but in each, after no great

length of time, assuming a determinate and dogmatic character. Luther

himself, as has been already observed, built up before he pulled down;

but the confession of Augsburg was the first great step made in giving

the discipline and subordination of regular government to the rebels

against the ancient religion. In this, however, it was taken for

granted, that their own differences of theological opinion were neither

numerous nor inevitable: a common symbol of faith, from which no man

could dissent without criminal neglect of the truth or blindness to it,

seemed always possible, though never attained; the pretensions of

catholic infallibility were replaced by a not less uncompromising and

intolerant dogmatism, availing itself, like the other, of the secular

power, and arrogating to itself, like the other, the assistance of the

Spirit of God. The mischiefs that have flowed from this early

abandonment of the right of free inquiry are as evident as its

inconsistency with the principles upon which the reformers had acted for

themselves; yet, without the confession of Augsburg and similar creeds,

it may be doubtful whether the protestant churches would have possessed

a sufficient unity to withstand their steady, veteran adversaries,

either in the war of words, or in those more substantial conflicts to

which they were exposed for the first century after the Reformation. The

schism of the Lutheran and Helvetic protestants did injury enough to

their cause; a more multitudinous brood of sectaries would, in the

temper of those times, have been such a disgrace as it could not have

overcome. It is still very doubtful, whether the close phalanx of Rome

can be opposed, in ages of strong religious zeal, by anything except

established or at least confederate churches.

|Editions of Scripture.|

36. We may conclude this section with mentioning the principal editions

of translations of Scripture published between 1520 and 1550. The

Complutensian edition of the New Testament, suspended since the year

1514, when the printing was finished, became public in 1522. The

Polyglott of the Old Testament, as has been before mentioned, had

appeared in 1517. An edition of the Septuagint and of the Greek

Testament was published at Strasburg by Cephalæus in 1524 and 1526. The

New Testament appeared at Haguenaw in 1521, and from the press of

Colinæus at Paris in 1534; another at Venice in 1538. But these, which

have become very scarce, were eclipsed in reputation by the labours of

Robert Stephens, who printed three editions in 1546, 1549, and 1550; the

two former of a small size, the last in folio. In this he consulted more

manuscripts than any earlier editor had possessed; and his margin is a

register of their various readings. It is therefore, though far from the

most perfect, yet the first endeavour to establish the text on critical

principles.

|Translations of Scripture.|

|English.|

37. The translation of the Old and New Testament by Luther is more

renowned for the purity of its German idiom, than for its adherence to

the original text. Simon has charged him with ignorance of Hebrew; and

when we consider how late he came to the study of either that or the

Greek language, and the multiplicity of his employments, it may be

believed that his knowledge of them was far from extensive.[714] From

this translation, however, and from the Latin Vuglate, the English one

of Tyndale and Coverdale, published in 1535 or 1536, is avowedly

taken.[715] Tyndale had printed his version of the New Testament in

1526. That of 1537, commonly called Matthew’s Bible, from the name of

the printer, though in substance the same as Tyndale’s, was

superintended by Rogers, the first martyr in the persecution of Mary,

who appears to have had some skill in the original languages. The Bible

of 1539, more usually called Cranmer’s Bible, was certainly revised by

comparison with the original. It is however questionable, whether there

was either sufficient leisure, or adequate knowledge of the Hebrew and

Greek languages, in the reign of Henry VIII., to consummate so arduous a

task as the thorough censure of the Vulgate text.

[714] Simon, Hist. Critique, V. T., p. 432. Andrès, xix. 160. Eichhorn

however says, that Luther’s translation must astonish any impartial

judge, who reflects on the lamentable deficiency of subsidiary

means in that age, iii. 317. The Lutherans have always highly

admired this work on account of its pure Germanism: it has been

almost as ill spoken of among Calvinists as by the Catholics

themselves. St. Aldegonde says, it is farther from the Hebrew than

any one he knows; ex qua manavit nostra ex vitiosa Germanicâ facta

vitiosior Belgico-Teutonica. Gerdes, iii. 60.

[715] Tyndale’s translation of the Pentateuch had been published in

1530. It has been much controverted of late years, whether he were

acquainted or not with Hebrew.

|In Italy and Low Countries.|

38. Bruccioli of Venice published a translation of the Scriptures into

Italian, which he professes to have formed upon the original text.[716]

It was retouched by Marmocchini, and printed as his own in 1538.

Zaccarias, a Florentine monk, gave another version in 1542, taken

chiefly from his two predecessors. The earlier translation of Malerbi

passed through twelve editions in this century.[717] The Spanish New

Testament by Francis de Enzina was printed at Antwerp in 1543, as the

Pentateuch in the same language was by some Jews at Constantinople in

1547.[718] Olaus Petri, the chief ecclesiastical adviser of Gustavus

Vasa, translated the Scriptures into Swedish, and Palladius into Danish,

before the middle of the century. But in no language were so many

editions of Scripture published as in that of Flanders or Holland; the

dialects being still more slightly different, I believe, at that time

than they are now. The old translation from the Vulgate, first printed

at Delft in 1497, appeared several times before the Reformation from the

presses of Antwerp and Amsterdam. A Flemish version of the New Testament

from that of Luther came out at Antwerp in 1522, the very year of its

publication at Wittenberg; and twelve times more in the next five years.

It appears from the catalogue of Panzer, that the entire Bible was

printed in the Flemish or Dutch language, within the first thirty-six

years of the sixteenth century, in fifteen editions, one of which was at

Louvain, one at Amsterdam, and the rest at Antwerp. Thirty-four editions

of the New Testament alone in that language appeared within the same

period; twenty-four of them at Antwerp.[719] Most of these were taken

from Luther, but some from the Vulgate. There can be no sort of

comparison between the number of these editions, and consequently the

eagerness of the people of the Low Countries for biblical knowledge,

considering the limited extent of their language, and anything that

could be found in the protestant states of the empire.

[716] The truth of this assertion is denied by Andrès, xix. 188.

[717] M’Crie’s Reformation in Italy, p. 43.

[718] This translation, which could have been of little use, was printed

in Hebrew characters, with the original, and with a version in

modern Greek, but in the same characters. It was reprinted in 1553

by some Italian Jews, in the ordinary letter. This Spanish

translation is of considerable antiquity, appearing by the language

to be of the twelfth century: it was made for the use of the

Spanish Jews, and preserved privately in their synagogues and

schools. This is one out of several translations of Scripture that

were made in Spain during the middle ages; one of them, perhaps, by

order of Alfonso X. Andrès, xix. 151. But in the sixteenth century,

even before the alarm about the progress of heresy began in Spain,

a stop was put to their promulgation, partly through the suspicions

entertained of the half-converted Jews. Id. 183. The translation of

Enzina, a suspected protestant, was of course not well received,

and was nearly suppressed. Id. ibid. M’Crie’s Hist. of the

Reformation in Spain.

[719] Panzer, Annales Typographici, Index.

|Latin translations.|

39. Notwithstanding the authority given to the Vulgate by the church of

Rome, it has never been forbidden either to criticise the text of that

version, or to publish a new one. Sanctes Pagninus, an oriental scholar

of some reputation, published a translation of the Old and New Testament

at Lyons in 1528. This has been reckoned too literal, and consequently

obscure and full of solecisms. That of Sebastian Munster, a more eminent

Hebraist, printed at Basle in 1534, though not free from oriental

idioms, which indeed very few translations have been, or perhaps rightly

can be, and influenced, according to some, by the false interpretations

of the rabbins, is more intelligible. Two of the most learned and candid

Romanists, Huet and Simon, give it a decided preference over the version

of Pagninus. Another translation by Leo Juda and Bibliander, at Zurich

in 1543, though more elegant than that of Munster, deviates too much

from the literal sense. This was reprinted at Paris in 1545 by

Robert Stephens, with notes attributed to Vatable.[720]

[720] Simon, Hist. Crit. du V. T. Biogr. Univ. Eichhorn, v. 565, et

post. Andrès, xix. 165.

|French translations.|

40. The earliest protestant translation in French is that by Olivetan at

Neufchatel in 1535. It has been said that Calvin had some share in this

edition; which, however, is of little value, except from its scarcity,

if it be true that the text of the version from the Vulgate, by Faber

Stapulensis, has been merely retouched. Faber had printed this, in

successive portions some time before; at first in France; but the

parliament of Paris, in 1525, having prohibited his translation, he was

compelled to have recourse to the press of Antwerp. This edition of

Faber appeared several times during the present period. The French Bible

of Louvain, which is that of Faber, revised by the command of Charles

V., appeared as a new translation in 1550.[721]

[721] Idem.

CHAPTER VII.

HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE, MORAL, AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, AND OF

JURISPRUDENCE IN EUROPE, FROM 1520 TO 1550.

SECT. I. 1520-1550.

_Speculative Philosophy._

|Logic included under this head.|

1. Under this head we shall comprehend not only what passes by the

loose, yet not unintelligible, appellation metaphysics, but those

theories upon the nature of things, which, resting chiefly upon assumed

dogmas, could not justly be reduced to the division of physical science.

The distinction may sometimes be open to cavil; but every man of a

reflecting mind will acknowledge the impossibility of a rigorous

classification of books. The science of logic, not only for the sake of

avoiding too many partitions, but on account of its peculiar connection,

in this period of literature, with speculative philosophy, will be

comprised in the same department.

|Slow defeat of scholastic philosophy.|

2. It might be supposed that the old scholastic philosophy, the

barbarous and unprofitable disputations which occupied the universities

of Europe for some hundred years, would not have endured much longer

against the contempt of a more enlightened generation. Wit and reason,

learning and religion, combined their forces to overthrow the idols of

the schools. They had no advocates able enough to say much in their

favour; but established possession, and that inert force which ancient

prejudices retain, even in a revolutionary age, especially when united

with civil and ecclesiastical authority, rendered the victory of good

sense and real philosophy very slow.

|It is sustained by the universities and regulars.|

3. The defenders of scholastic disputation availed themselves of the

commonplace plea, that its abuses furnished no conclusion against its

use. The barbarousness of its terminology might be in some measure

discarded; the questions which had excited ridicule might be abandoned

to their fate; but it was still contended that too much of theology was

involved in the schemes of school philosophy erected by the great

doctors of the church to be sacrificed for heathen or heretical

innovations. The universities adhered to their established exercises;

and though these, except in Spain, grew less active, and provoked less

emulation, they at least prevented the introduction of any more liberal

course of study. But the chief supporters of scholastic philosophy,

which became, in reality or in show, more nearly allied to the genuine

authority of Aristotle, than it could have been, while his writings were

unknown or ill translated, were found, after the revival of letters,

among the Dominican or Franciscan orders; to whom the Jesuits, inferior

to none in acuteness, lent, in process of time, their own very powerful

aid.[722] Spain was, above all countries, and that for a very long time,

the asylum of the schoolmen; and this seems to have been one among many

causes, which have excluded, as we may say, the writers of that kingdom,

with but few exceptions, from the catholic communion of European

literature.

[722] Brucker, iv. 117, et post. Buhle has drawn copiously from his

predecessor, ii. 448.

|Commentators on Aristotle.|

4. These men, or many of them, at least towards the middle of the

century, were acquainted with the writings of Aristotle. But commenting

upon the Greek text, they divided it into the smallest fragments, gave

each a syllogistic form, and converted every proposition into a complex

series of reasonings, till they ended, says Buhle, in an endless and

insupportable verbosity. “In my own labours upon Aristotle,” he

proceeds, “I have sometimes had recourse, in a difficult passage, to

these scholastic commentators, but never gained anything else by my

trouble than an unpleasant confusion of ideas; the little there is of

value being scattered and buried in a chaos of endless words.”[723]

[723] ii. 417.

|Attack of Vives on scholastics.|

5. The scholastic method had the reformers both of religion and

literature against it. One of the most strenuous of the latter was

Ludovic Vives, in his great work, De corruptis Artibus et tradendis

Disciplinis. Though the main object of this is the restoration of what

were called the studies of humanity (humaniores literæ), which were ever

found incompatible with the old metaphysics, he does not fail to lash

the schoolmen directly in parts of this long treatise, so that no one,

according to Brucker, has seen better their weak points or struck them

with more effect. Vives was a native of Valencia, and at one time

preceptor to the princess Mary in England.[724]

[724] Brucker, iv. 87. Meiners (Vergleich. der Sitten, ii. 730-755),

has several extracts from Vives as to the scholasticism of the

beginning of this century. He was placed by some of his

contemporaries in a triumvirate with Erasmus and Budæus.

|Contempt of them in England.|

6. In the report of the visitation of Oxford, ordered by Henry VIII. in

1535, contempt for the scholastic philosophy is displayed in the

triumphant tone of conquerors. Henry himself had been an admirer of

Thomas Aquinas. But the recent breach with the see of Rome made it

almost necessary to declare against the schoolmen, its steadiest

adherents. And the lovers of ancient learning, as well as the favourers

of the Reformation, were gaining ground in the English government.[725]

[725] Wood’s Hist. of University of Oxford. The passage wherein Antony

Wood deplores the “setting Duns in Bocardo” has been often quoted

by those who make merry with the lamentations of ignorance.

|Veneration for Aristotle.|

7. But while the subtle, though unprofitable, ingenuity of the Thomists

and Scotists was giving way, the ancient philosophy, of which that of

the scholastic doctors was a corruption, restored in its genuine

lineaments, kept possession of the field with almost redoubled honour.

What the doctors of the middle ages had been in theology, that was

Aristotle in all physical and speculative science; and the church

admitted him into an alliance of dependency for her own service. The

Platonic philosophy, to which the patronage of the Medici and the

writings of Ficinus had given countenance in the last century, was much

fallen, nor had, at this particular time, any known supporters in

Europe. Those who turned their minds to physical knowledge, while they

found little to their purpose in Plato, were furnished by the rival

school with many confident theories and some useful truth. Nor was

Aristotle without adherents among the conspicuous cultivators of polite

literature; who willingly paid that deference to a sage of Greece, they

blushed to show for a barbarian dialectician of the thirteenth century.

To them at least he was indebted for appearing in a purer text, and in

more accurate versions; nor was the criticism of the sixteenth century

more employed on any other writer. By the help of philology, as her

bounden handmaid, philosophy trimmed afresh her lamp. The true

peripatetic system, according to so competent a judge as Buhle, was

first made known to the rest of Europe in the sixteenth century; and the

new disciples of Aristotle, endeavouring to possess themselves of the

spirit, as well as literal sense of his positions, prepared the way for

a more advanced generation to poise their weight in the scale of

reason.[726]

[726] Buhle, ii. 462.

|Melanchthon countenances him.|

8. The name of Aristotle was sovereign in the continental universities;

and the union between his philosophy, or what bore that title, and the

church, appeared so long established, that they must stand or fall

together. Luther accordingly, in the commencement of the Reformation,

inveighed against the Aristotelian logic and metaphysics, or rather

against those sciences themselves; nor was Melanchthon at that time much

behind him. But time ripened in this, as it did in theology, the

disciple’s excellent understanding; and he even obtained influence

enough over the master to make him retract some of that invective

against philosophy, which at first threatened to bear down all human

reason. Melanchthon became a strenuous advocate of Aristotle, in

opposition to all other ancient philosophy. He introduced into the

university of Wittenberg, to which all protestant Germany looked up, a

scheme of dialectics and physics, founded upon the peripatetic

school, but improved, as Buhle tells us, by his own acuteness and

knowledge. Thus in his books logic is taught with a constant reference

to rhetoric; and the physical science of antiquity is enlarged by all

that had been added in astronomy and physiology. It need hardly be said,

that the authority of Scripture was always resorted to as controlling a

philosophy, which had been considered unfavourable to natural

religion.[727]

[727] Buhle, ii. 427.

|His own philosophical treatises.|

9. I will not contend, after a very cursory inspection of this work of

Melanchthon, against the elaborate panegyric of Buhle; but I cannot

think the Initia Doctrinæ Physicæ much calculated to advance the

physical sciences. He insists very fully on the influence of the stars

in producing events which we call fortuitous, and even in moulding the

human character; a prejudice under which this eminent man is well known

to have laboured. Melanchthon argues sometimes from the dogmas of

Aristotle, sometimes from a literal interpretation of Scripture, so as

to arrive at strange conclusions. Another treatise, entitled De Animâ,

which I have not seen, is extolled by Buhle as comprehending not only

the psychology but the physiology also of man, and as having rendered

great service in the age for which it was written. This universality of

talents, and we have not yet adverted to the ethics and dialectics of

Melanchthon, enhanced his high reputation; nor is it surprising, that

the influence of so great a name should have secured the preponderance

of the Aristotelian philosophy in the protestant schools of Germany for

more than a century.

|Aristotelians of Italy.|

10. The treatise of the most celebrated Aristotelian of his age,

Pomponatius, on the immortality of the soul, has been already mentioned.

In 1525 he published two books, one on incantations, the other on fate

and free will. They are extremely scarce, but, according to the analysis

of Brucker, indicate a scheme of philosophy by no means friendly to

religion.[728] I do not find any other of the Aristotelian school who

falls within the present thirty years, of sufficient celebrity to

deserve mention in this place. But the Italian Aristotelians were

divided into two classes; one to which Pomponatius belonged, following

the interpretation of the ancient Greek scholiasts, especially Alexander

of Aphrodisea; the other, that of the famous Spanish philosopher of the

twelfth century, Averroes, who may rather be considered an heresiarch in

the peripatetic church, than a genuine disciple of its founder. The

leading tenet of Averrhoism was the numerical unity of the soul of

mankind, notwithstanding its partition among millions of living

individuals.[729] This proposition, which it may seem difficult to

comprehend, and which Buhle deems a misapprehension of a passage in

Aristotle, natural enough to one who read him in a bad Arabic version,

is so far worthy of notice, that it contains the germ of an atheistical

philosophy, which spread far, as we shall hereafter see, in the latter

part of this century, and in the seventeenth.

[728] Brucker, iv. 166.

[729] See Bayle, Averroes, note E, to which I omitted to refer on a

former mention of the subject, p. 98.

|University of Paris.|

11. Meantime the most formidable opposition to the authority of

Aristotle sprung up in the very centre of his dominions; a conspiracy

against the sovereign in his court itself. For, as no university had

been equal in renown for scholastic acuteness to that of Paris, there

was none so tenacious of its ancient discipline. The very study of Greek

and Hebrew was a dangerous innovation in the eyes of its rulers, which

they sought to restrain by the intervention of the civil magistrate. Yet

here, in their own schools, the ancient routine of dialectics was

suddenly disturbed by an audacious hand.

|New logic of Ramus.|

12. Peter Ramus (Ramée) a man of great natural acuteness, an intrepid,

though too arrogant a spirit, and a sincere lover of truth, having

acquired a considerable knowledge of languages as well as philosophy in

the university, where he originally filled, it is said, a menial office

in one of the colleges, began publicly to attack the Aristotelian method

of logic, by endeavouring to substitute a new system of his own. He had

been led to ask himself, he tells us, after three years passed in the

study of logic, whether it had rendered him more conversant with facts,

more fluent in speech, more quick in poetry, wiser, in short, any way

than it had found him; and being compelled to answer all this in the

negative, he was put on considering, whether the fault were in himself,

or in his course of study. Before he could be quite satisfied as to this

question, he fell accidentally upon reading some dialogues of Plato; in

which, to his infinite satisfaction, he found a species of logic very

unlike the Aristotelian, and far more apt, as it appeared, to the

confirmation of truth. From the writings of Plato, and from his

own ingenious mind, Ramus framed a scheme of dialectics, which

immediately shook the citadel of the Stagyrite; and, though in itself it

did not replace the old philosophy, contributed very powerfully to its

ultimate decline. The Institutiones Dialecticæ of Ramus were published

in 1543.

|It meets with unfair treatment.|

13. In the first instance, however, he met with the strenuous opposition

which awaits such innovators. The university laid their complaint before

the parliament of Paris; the king took it out of the hands of the

parliament, and a singular trial was awarded as to the merits of the

rival systems of logic, two judges being nominated by Goveanus, the

prominent accuser of Ramus, two by himself, and a fifth by the king.

Francis, it seems, though favourable to the classical scholars, whose

wishes might generally go against the established dialectics, yet,

perhaps, from connecting this innovation with those in religion, took

the side of the university; and after a regular hearing, though, as is

alleged, a very partial one, the majority of the judges pronouncing an

unfavourable decision, Ramus was prohibited from teaching, and his book

was suppressed. This prohibition, however, was taken off a few years

afterwards, and his popularity as a lecturer in rhetoric gave umbrage to

the university. It was not till some time afterwards that his system

spread over part of the continent.[730]

[730] Launoy de Variâ Aristot. Fortuna in Acad. Paris. The sixth stage

of Aristotle’s fortune, Launoy reckons to be the Ramean

controversy, and the victory of the Greek philosopher. He quotes a

passage from Omer Talon, which shows that the trial was conducted

with much unfairness and violence, p. 112. See also Brucker, v.

548-583, for a copious account of Ramus; and Buhle, ii. 579-602;

also Bayle.

|Its merits and character.|

14. Ramus has been once mentioned by Lord Bacon, certainly no bigot to

Aristotle, with much contempt, and another time with limited

praise.[731] It is however generally admitted by critical historians of

philosophy, that he conferred material obligations on science, by

decrying the barbarous logic of the schoolmen. What are the merits of

his own method, is a different question. It seems evidently to have been

more popular and convenient than that in use. He treated logic as merely

the art of arguing to others, _ars disserendi_; and, not unnaturally

from this definition, comprehended in it much that the ancients had

placed in the province of rhetoric, the invention and disposition of

proofs in discourse.

[731] Hooker also says with severe irony: “In the poverty of that other

new-devised aid, two things there are notwithstanding singular. Of

marvellous quick despatch it is, and doth show them that have it as

much almost in three days, as if it had dwelt threescore years with

them,” &c. Again: “Because the curiosity of man’s wit doth many

times with peril wade farther in the search of things, than were

convenient, the same is hereby restrained into such generalities,

as everywhere offering themselves, are apparent unto men of the

weakest conceit that need be: so as following the rules and

precepts thereof, we may find it to be an art, which teacheth the

way of speedy discourse, and restraineth the mind of man, that it

may not wax over-wise.” Eccles. Pol. i. § 6.

|Buhle’s account of it.|

15. “If we compare,” says Buhle, “the logic of Ramus with that which was

previously in use, it is impossible not to recognise its superiority. If

we judge of it by comparison with the extent of the science itself and

the degree of perfection it has attained in the hands of modern writers,

we shall find but an imperfect and faulty attempt.” Ramus neglected, he

proceeds to say, the relation of the reason to other faculties of the

mind, the sources of error, and the best means of obviating them, the

precautions necessary in forming and examining our judgments. His rules

display the pedantry of system as much as those of the Aristotelians.[732]

[732] Buhle, ii. 593, 595.

16. As the logic of Ramus appears to be of no more direct utility than

that of Aristotle in assisting us to determine the absolute truth of

propositions, and consequently could not satisfy Lord Bacon, so perhaps

it does not interfere with the proper use of syllogisms, which indeed,

on a less extended scale than in Aristotle, form part of the Ramean

dialectics. Like all those who assailed the authority of Aristotle, he

kept no bounds in depreciating his works; aware perhaps that the public,

and especially younger students, will pass more readily from admiration

to contempt, than to a qualified estimation, of any famous man.

|Paracelsus.|

17. While Ramus was assaulting the stronghold of Aristotelian despotism,

the syllogistic method of argumentation, another province of that

extensive empire, its physical theory, was invaded by a still more

audacious, and we must add, a much more unworthy innovator, Theophrastus

Paracelsus. Though few of this extraordinary person’s writings were

published before the middle of the century, yet as he died in

1541, and his disciples began very early to promulgate his theories, we

may introduce his name more appropriately in this than in any later

period. The system, if so it may be called, of Paracelsus had a primary

regard to medicine, which he practised with the boldness of a wandering

empiric. It was not unusual in Germany to carry on this profession; and

Paracelsus employed his youth in casting nativities, practising

chiromancy, and exhibiting chemical tricks. He knew very little Latin,

and his writings are as unintelligible from their style as their

substance. Yet he was not without acuteness in his own profession; and

his knowledge of pharmaceutic chemistry was far beyond that of his age.

Upon this real advantage he founded those extravagant theories, which

attracted many ardent minds in the sixteenth century, and were

afterwards woven into new schemes of fanciful philosophy. His own models

were the oriental reveries of the Cabbala, and the theosophy of the

mystics. He seized hold of a notion which easily seduces the imagination

of those who do not ask for rational proof, that there is a constant

analogy between the macrocosm, as they called it, of external nature,

and the microcosm of man. This harmony and parallelism of all things, he

maintains, can only be made known to us by Divine revelation; and hence

all heathen philosophy has been erroneous. The key to the knowledge of

nature is in the Scriptures only, studied by means of the Spirit of God

communicating an interior light to the contemplative soul. So great an

obscurity reigns over the writings of Paracelsus, which, in Latin at

least, are not originally his own, for he had but a scanty acquaintance

with that language, that it is difficult to pronounce upon his opinions,

especially as he affects to use words in senses imposed by himself; the

development of his physical system consisted in an accumulation of

chemical theorems, none of which are conformable to sound

philosophy.[733]

[733] Brucker, iv. 646-684, has copiously descanted on the theosophy

of Paracelsus; and a still more enlarged account of it will be

found in the third volume of Sprengel’s Geschichte der

Arzneykunste, which I use in the French translation. Buhle is very

brief in this instance, though he has a general partiality to

mystical rhapsodies.

|His impostures.|

18. A mixture of fanaticism and imposture is very palpable in

Paracelsus, as in what he calls his Gabalistic art, which produces by

imagination and natural faith, “per fidem naturalem ingenitam,” all

magical operations, and counterfeits by these means whatever we see in

the external world. Man has a sidereal as well as material body, an

astral element, which all do not partake in equal degrees; and therefore

the power of magic which is in fact the power of astral properties, or

of producing those effects which the stars naturally produce, is not

equally attainable by all. This astral element of the body survives for

a time after death, and explains the apparition of dead persons; but in

this state it is subject to those who possess the art of magic, which is

then called necromancy.

|And extravagancies.|

19. Paracelsus maintained the animation of everything; all minerals both

feed and render their food. And besides this life of every part of

nature, it is peopled with spiritual beings, inhabitants of the four

elements, subject to disease and death like man. These are the silvains

(sylphs), undines, or nymphs, gnomes, and salamanders. It is thus

observable that he first gave these names, which rendered afterwards the

Rosicrucian fables so celebrated. These live with man, and sometimes,

except the salamanders, bear children to him; they know future events

and reveal them to us; they are also guardians of hidden treasures,

which may be obtained by their means.[734] I may perhaps have said too

much about paradoxes so absurd and mendacious; but literature is a

garden of weeds as well as flowers; and Paracelsus forms a link in the

history of opinion, which should not be overlooked.

[734] Sprengel, iii. 305.

|Cornelius Agrippa.|

20. The sixteenth century was fertile in men, like Paracelsus, full of

arrogant pretensions, and eager to substitute their own dogmatism for

that they endeavour to overthrow. They are, compared with Aristotle,

like the ephemeral demagogues who start up to a power they abuse as well

as usurp on the overthrow of some ancient tyranny. One of these was

Cornelius Agrippa, chiefly remembered by the legends of his magical

skill. Agrippa had drunk deep at the turbid streams of cabbalistic

philosophy, which had already intoxicated two men of far greater merit,

and born for greater purposes, Picus of Mirandola and Reuchlin. The

treatise of Agrippa on occult philosophy is a rhapsody of wild theory

and juggling falsehood. It links, however, the theosophy of Paracelsus

and the later sect of Behmenists with an oriental lore, venerable in

some measure for its antiquity, and full of those aspirations of the

soul to break her limits, and withdraw herself from the dominion

of sense, which soothed, in old time, the reflecting hours of many a

solitary sage on the Ganges and the Oxus. The Jewish doctors had

borrowed much from this eastern source, and especially the leading

principle of their Cabbala, the emanation of all finite being from the

infinite. But this philosophy was in all its successive stages mingled

with arbitrary, if not absurd, notions as to angelic and demoniacal

intelligences, till it reached a climax in the sixteenth century.

|His pretended philosophy.|

21. Agrippa, evidently the precursor of Paracelsus, builds his pretended

philosophy on the four elements, by whose varying forces the phenomena

of the world are chiefly produced; yet not altogether, since there are

occult forces of greater efficacy than the elementary, and which are

derived from the soul of the world, and from the influence of the stars.

The mundane spirit actuates every being, but in different degrees, and

gives life and form to each; form being derived from the ideas which the

Deity has empowered his intelligent ministers, as it were by the use of

his seal, to impress. A scale of being, that fundamental theorem of the

emanative philosophy, connects the higher and lower orders of things;

and hence arises the power of magic; for all things have, by their

concatenation, a sympathy with those above and below them, as sound is

propagated along a string. But besides these natural relations, which

the occult philosophy brings to light, it teaches us also how to

propitiate and influence the intelligences, mundane, angelic, or

demoniacal, which people the universe. This is best done by fumigations

with ingredients corresponding to their respective properties. They may

even thus be subdued, and rendered subject to man. The demons are

clothed with a material body, and attached to the different elements;

they always speak Hebrew, as the oldest tongue.[735] It would be

trifling to give one moment’s consideration to this gibberish, were it

not evidently connected with superstitious absurdities, that enchained

the mind of Europe for some generations. We see the credence in

witchcraft and spectral appearances, in astrology and magical charms, in

demoniacal possessions, those fruitful springs of infatuation,

wretchedness, and crime, sustained by an impudent parade of metaphysical

philosophy. The system of Agrippa is the mere creed of magical

imposture, on which Paracelsus, and still more Jacob Behmen, grafted a

sort of religious mysticism. But in their general influence these

theories were still more pernicious than the technical pedantry of the

schools. A Venetian monk, Francis Georgius, published a scheme of

blended Cabbalistic and Platonic, or Neo-platonic, philosophy, in 1525;

but having no collateral pretensions to fame, like some other

worshippers of the same phantom, he can only be found in the historians

of obsolete paradoxes.[736]

[735] Brucker, iv. 410. Sprengel, iii. 226. Buhle, ii. 368.

[736] Brucker, iv. 374-386. Buhle, ii. 367.

|His sceptical treatise.|

22. Agrippa has left, among other forgotten productions, a treatise on

the uncertainty of the sciences, which served in some measure to promote

a sceptical school of philosophy; no very unnatural result of such

theories as he had proposed. It is directed against the imperfections

sufficiently obvious in most departments of science, but contains

nothing which has not been said more ably since that time. It is

remarkable that he contradicts much that he had advanced in favour of

the occult philosophy, and of the art of Raymond Lully.[737]

[737] Brucker, Buhle.

|Cardan.|

23. A man far superior to both Agrippa and Paracelsus was Jerome Cardan;

his genius was quick, versatile, fertile, and almost profound; yet no

man can read the strange book on his own life, wherein he describes, or

pretends to describe, his extraordinary character, without suspecting a

portion of insanity; a suspicion which the hypothesis of wilful

falsehood would, considering what the book contains, rather augment than

diminish. Cardan’s writings are extremely voluminous; the chief that

relate to general philosophy are those entitled De Subtilitate et

Varietate Rerum. Brucker praises these for their vast erudition,

supported by innumerable experiments and observations on nature, which

furnish no trifling collection of facts to readers of judgment; while

his incoherence of ideas, his extravagance of fancy, and confused

method, have rendered him of little service to philosophy. Cardan

professed himself a staunch enemy of Aristotle.[738]

[738] Brucker, v. 85. Cardan had much of the same kind of superstition

as Paracelsus and Agrippa. He admits as the basis of his physical

philosophy a sympathy between the heavenly bodies and our own; not

only general, but distributive: the sun being in harmony with the

heart, the moon with the animal juices. All organised bodies he

held to be animated, so that there is no principle which may not be

called nature. All is ruled by the properties of numbers. Heat and

moisture are the only real qualities in nature; the first being the

formal, the second the material cause of all things. Sprengel, iii.

278.

SECT. II. 1520-1550.

_On Moral and Political Philosophy._

|Influence of moral writers.|

24. By moral philosophy, we are to understand not only systems of

ethics, and exhortations to virtue, but that survey of the nature or

customs of mankind, which men of reflecting minds are apt to take, and

by which they become qualified to guide and advise their fellows. The

influence of such men, through the popularity of their writings, is not

the same in all periods of society; it has sensibly abated in modern

times, and is chiefly exercised through fiction, or at least a more

amusing style than was found sufficient for our forefathers; and from

this change of fashion, as well as from the advance of real knowledge,

and the greater precision of language, many books, once famous, have

scarcely retained a place in our libraries, and never lie on our tables.

|Cortegiano of Castiglione.|

25. In this class of literature, good writing, such at least as at the

time appears to be good, has always been the condition of public esteem.

They form a large portion of the classical prose in every language. And

it is chiefly in this point of view that several of the most

distinguished can deserve any mention at present. None was more renowned

in Italy than the Cortegiano of Castiglione, whose first edition is in

1528. We here find both the gracefulness of the language in this,

perhaps its best age, and the rules of polished life in an Italian

court. These, indeed, are rather favourably represented, if we compare

them with all we know of the state of manners from other sources; but it

can be no reproach to the author that he raised the standard of

honourable character above the level of practice. The precepts however

are somewhat trivial, and the expression diffuse; faults not a little

characteristic of his contemporaries. A book that is serious, without

depth of thought or warmth of feeling, cannot be read through with

pleasure.

26. At some distance below Castiglione in merit, and equally in

reputation, we may place the dialogues of Sperone Speroni, a writer

whose long life embraced two ages of Italian literature. These dialogues

belong to the first, and were published in 1544. Such of them as relate

to moral subjects, which he treats more theoretically than Castiglione,

are solemn and dry; they contain good sense in good language; but the

one has no originality, and the other no spirit.

|Marco Aurelio of Guevara.|

27. A Spanish prelate in the court of Charles obtained an extraordinary

reputation in Europe by a treatise so utterly forgotten at present, that

Bouterwek has even omitted his name. This was Guevara, author of Marco

Aurelio con el Relox de Principes, as the title-page awkwardly runs. It

contains several feigned letters of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, which

probably in a credulous age passed for genuine, and gave vogue to the

book. It was continually reprinted in different languages for more than

a century; scarce any book except the Bible, says Casaubon, has been so

much translated, or so frequently printed.[739] It must be owned that

Guevara is dull; but he wrote in the infancy of Spanish literature. The

first part of this book is properly entitled Marco Aurelio, and is

filled with the counterfeited letters; the second, Relox de Principes,

the Watch or Dial of Princes, is but a farago of trite moral and

religious reflections, with an intermixture of classical quotations. It

is fair to observe, that Guevara seems uniformly a friend to good and

just government, and that he probably employs Roman stories as a screen

to his satire on the abuses of his time. Antonio and Bayle censure this

as a literary forgery more severely than is quite reasonable. Andrès

extols the style very highly.[740]

[739] Bayle speaks of Guevara’s Marco Aurelio with great contempt; its

reputation had doubtless much declined before that time.

[740] vii. 148. In 1541, Sir Thomas Elyot published “The Image of

Government, compiled of the Acts and Sentences of Alexander

Severus,” as the work of Encolpius, an imaginary secretary to that

emperor. Some have thought this genuine, or at least no forgery of

Elyot’s; but I see little reason to doubt that he imitated Guevara.

Fabric. Bibl. Lat. and Herbert.

|His Menosprecio di Corte.|

28. Guevara wrote better, or more pleasingly, in some other moral

essays. One of them Menosprecio di Corte y Alabanza d’Aldea,

indifferently translated into English by Thomas Tymme in 1575, contains

some eloquent passages; and being dictated apparently by his own

feelings, instead of the spirit of book-making, is far superior to the

more renowned Marco Aurelio. Antonio blames Guevara for affectation of

antithesis, and too studious desire to say everything well. But this

sententious and antithetical style of the Spanish writers is

worthy of our attention; for it was imitated by their English admirers,

and formed a style much in vogue in the reigns of Elizabeth and James.

Thus, to take a very short specimen from Tymme’s translation: “In the

court,” says Guevara, “it profits little to be wise, forasmuch as good

service is soon forgotten, friends soon fail and enemies augment, the

nobility doth forget itself, science is forgotten, humility despised,

truth cloaked and hid, and good counsel refused.” This elaborately

condensed antithetical manner cannot have been borrowed from the

Italians, of whom it is by no means a distinguishing feature.

|Perez d’Oliva.|

29. Bouterwek has taken notice of a moral writer contemporary with

Guevara, though not so successful in his own age, Perez d’Oliva. Of him,

Andrès says, that the slight specimen he has left in his dialogue on the

dignity of man, displays the elegance, politeness, and vigour of his

style. It is written, says Bouterwek, in a natural and easy manner; the

ideas are for the most part clearly and accurately developed, and the

oratorical language, particularly where it is appropriately introduced,

is powerful and picturesque.[741]

[741] Bouterwek, p. 309. Andres, vii. 149.

|Ethical writings of Erasmus and Melanchthon.|

30. The writings of Erasmus are very much dedicated to the inculcation

of Christian ethics. The Enchiridion Militis Christiani, the Lingua,

and, above all, the Colloquies, which have this primary object in view,

may be distinguished from the rest. The Colloquies are, from their

nature, the most sportive and amusing of his works; the language of

Erasmus has no prudery; nor his moral code, though strict, any

austerity; it is needless to add, that his piety has no superstition.

The dialogue is short and pointed, the characters display themselves

naturally, the ridicule falls, in general, with skill and delicacy; the

moral is not forced, yet always in view; the manners of the age, in some

of the Colloquies, as in the German Inn, are humorously and agreeably

represented. Erasmus, perhaps, in later times, would have been

successful as a comic writer. The works of Vives breathe an equally pure

spirit of morality. But it is unnecessary to specify works of this

class, which, valuable as they are in their tendency, form too much the

staple literature of every generation to be enumerated in its history.

The treatise of Melanchthon, Moralis Philosophiæ Epitome, stands on

different grounds. It is a compendious system of ethics, built in great

measure on that of Aristotle, but with such variation as the principles

of Christianity, or his own judgment, led him to introduce. Hence,

though he exhorts young students, as the result of his own long

reflection on the subject, to embrace the Peripatetic theory of morals,

in preference of those of the Stoic or Epicurean school,[742] and

contends for the utility of moral philosophy, as part of the law of God,

and the exposition of that of nature, he admits that the reason is too

weak to discern the necessity of perfect obedience, or the sinfulness of

natural appetite.[743] In this epitome, which is far from servilely

following the Aristotelian dogmas, he declares wholly against usury,

less wise in this than Calvin, and asserts the magistrate’s right to

punish heretics.

[742] Ego vero qui has sectarum controversias diu multumque agitavi,

ἄνω καὶ κάτω στρέφων [anô kai katô strephôn], ut Plato facere

præcipit, valde adhortor adolescentulos, ut repudiatis Stoicis et

Epicureis, amplectantur Peripatetica. Præfat. ad. Mor. Philos.

Epist. (1549).

[743] Id. p. 4. The following passage, taken nearly at random, may

serve as a fair specimen of Melanchthon’s style:

Primum cum necesse sit legem Dei, item magistratuum leges nosse, ut

disciplinam teneamus ad coercendas cupiditates, facile intelligi

potest, hanc philosophiam etiam prodesse, quæ est quædam domestica

disciplina, quæ cum demonstrat fontes et causas virtutum, accendit

animos ad earum amorem; abeunt enim studia in mores, atque hoc

magis invitantur animi, quia quo propius aspicimus res bonas, eo

magis ipsas et admiramur et amamus. Hic autem perfecta notitia

virtutis quæritur. Neque vero dubium est, quin, ut Plato ait,

sapientia, si quod ejus simulacrum manifestum in oculos incurreret,

acerrimos amores excitaret. Nulla autem fingi effigies potest, quæ

propius exprimat virtutem et clarius ob oculos ponat spectantibus,

quam hæc doctrina. Quare ejus tractatio magnam vim habet ad

excitandos animos, ad amorem rerum honestarum, præsertim in bonis

ac mediocribus ingeniis, p. 6.

He tacitly retracts in this treatise all he had said against

free will in the first edition of the Loci Communes; in hac

quæstione moderatio adhibenda est, ne quas amplectamur opiniones

immoderatas in utramque partem, quæ aut moribus officiant, aut

beneficia Christi obscurent, p. 34.

|Sir T. Elyot’s Governor.|

31. Sir Thomas Elyot’s Governor, published in 1531, though it might also

find a place in the history of political philosophy, or of classical

literature, seems best to fall under this head; education of youth being

certainly no insignificant province of moral science. The author was a

gentleman of good family, and had been employed by the king in several

embassies. The Biographia Britannica pronounces him “an excellent

grammarian, poet, rhetorician, philosopher, physician, cosmographer, and

historian.” For some part of this sweeping eulogy we have no evidence;

but it is a high praise to have been one of our earliest English writers

of worth, and though much inferior in genius to Sir Thomas More, equal

perhaps in learning and sagacity to any scholar of the age of Henry

VIII. The plan of Sir Thomas Elyot in his Governor, as laid down in his

dedication to the king, is bold enough. It is “to describe in our vulgar

tongue the form of a just public weal, which matter I have gathered as

well of the sayings of most noble authors, Greek and Latin, as by mine

own experience, I being continually pained in some daily affairs of the

public weal of this most noble realm almost from my childhood.” But it

is far from answering to this promise. After a few pages on the

superiority of regal over every other government, he passes to the

subject of education, not of a prince only, but any gentleman’s son,

with which he fills up the rest of his first book.

|Severity of education.|

32. This contains several things worthy of observation. He advises that

children be used to speak Latin from their infancy, and either learn

Latin and Greek together, or begin with Greek. Elyot deprecates “cruel

and _yrous_ schoolmasters, by whom the wits of children be dulled,

whereof we need no better author to witness, than daily

experience.”[744] All testimonies concur to this savage ill-treatment of

boys in the schools of this period. The fierceness of the Tudor

government, the religious intolerance, the polemical brutality, the

rigorous justice, when justice it was, of our laws, seem to have

engendered a hardness of character, which displayed itself in severity

of discipline, when it did not even reach the point of arbitrary or

malignant cruelty. Every one knows the behaviour of Lady Jane Grey’s

parents towards their accomplished and admirable child; the slave of

their temper in her brief life, the victim of their ambition in death.

The story told by Erasmus of Colet is also a little too trite for

repetition. The general fact is indubitable; and I think we may ascribe

much of the hypocrisy and disingenuousness, which became almost national

characteristics in this and the first part of the next century, to the

rigid scheme of domestic discipline so frequently adopted; though I will

not say but that we owe some part of the firmness and power of

self-command, which were equally manifest in the English character, to

the same cause.

[744] Chap. x.

|He seems to avoid politics.|

33. Elyot dwells much and justly on the importance of elegant arts, such

as music, drawing, and carving, by which he means sculpture, and of

manly exercises, in liberal education; and objects with reason to the

usual practice of turning mere boys at fifteen to the study of the

laws.[745] In the second book he seems to come back to his original

subject, by proposing to consider what qualities a governor ought to

possess. But this soon turns to long commonplace ethics, copiously

illustrated out of ancient history, but perhaps, in general, little more

applicable to kings than to private men, at least those of superior

station. It is plain that Elyot did not venture to handle the political

part of his subject as he wished to do. He seems worthy, upon the whole,

on account of the solidity of his reflections, to hold a higher place

than Ascham, to whom, in some respects, he bears a good deal of

resemblance.

[745] Chap. xiv.

|Nicholas Machiavel.|

34. Political philosophy was not yet a common theme with the writers of

Europe, unless so far as the moral duties of princes may have been

vaguely touched by Guevara or Elyot, or their faults strongly, but

incidentally adverted to by Erasmus and More. One great luminary,

however, appeared at this time, though, as he has been usually deemed,

rather a sinister meteor than a benignant star. It is easy to anticipate

the name of Nicolas Machiavel. His writings are posthumous, and were

first published at Rome early in 1532, with an approbation of the pope.

It is certain, however, that the treatise called The Prince was written

in 1513, and the Discourses on Livy about the same time.[746] Few are

ignorant that Machiavel filled for nearly fifteen years the post of

secretary to that government of Florence which was established between

the expulsion of the Medici in 1494 and their return in 1512. This was

in fact the remnant of the ancient oligarchy, which had yielded to the

ability and popular influence of Cosmo and Lorenzo de’ Medici.

Machiavel, having served this party, over which the gonfalonier Pietro

Soderini latterly presided, with great talents and activity, was

naturally involved in their ruin; and having undergone imprisonment and

torture on a charge of conspiracy against the new government, was living

in retired poverty when he set himself down to the composition of his

two political treatises. The strange theories, that have been brought

forward to account for The Prince of Machiavel, could never be revived

after the publication of Ginguéné’s history of Italian literature, and

the article on Machiavel in the Biographie Universelle, if men had not

sometimes a perverse pleasure in seeking refinements, after the simple

truth has been laid before them.[747] His own language may assure us of

what surely is not very improbable, that his object was to be employed

in the service of Julian de’ Medici, who was at the head of the state in

Florence, almost in the situation of a prince, though without the title;

and that he wrote this treatise to recommend himself in his eyes. He had

been faithful to the late powers; but these powers were dissolved; and

in a republic, a dissolved government, itself the recent creature of

force and accident, being destitute of the prejudice in favour of

legitimacy, could have little chance of reviving again. It is probable,

from the general tenor of Machiavel’s writings, that he would rather

have lived under a republic than under a prince; but the choice was not

left; and it was better, in his judgment, to serve a master usefully for

the state, than to waste his life in poverty and insignificance.

[746] There are mutual references in each of these books to the other,

from which Ginguéné has reasonably inferred that they were in

progress at the same time. Hist. Litt. de l’Italie, viii. 46.

[747] Ginguéné has taken great pains with his account of Machiavel,

and I do not know that there is a better. The Biographie

Universelle has a good anonymous article. Tiraboschi had treated

the subject in a most slovenly manner.

|His motives in writing The Prince.|

35. We may also in candour give Machiavel credit for sincerity in that

animated exhortation to Julian which concludes the last chapter of The

Prince, where he calls him forth to the noble enterprise of rescuing

Italy from the barbarians. Twenty years that beautiful land had been the

victim of foreign armies, before whom in succession every native state

had been humiliated or overthrown. His acute mind easily perceived that

no republican institution would possess stability or concert enough to

cast off this yoke. He formed therefore the idea of a prince; one raised

newly to power, for Italy furnished no hereditary line; one sustained by

a native army, for he deprecates the employment of mercenaries; one

loved, but feared also, by the many; one to whom, in so magnanimous an

undertaking as the liberation of Italy, all her cities would render a

willing obedience. It might be, in part, a strain of flattery, in which

he points out to Julian of Medici a prospect so disproportionate, as we

know historically, to his opportunities and his character; yet it was

one also perhaps of sanguine fancy and unfeigned hope.

|Some of his rules not immoral.|

36. None of the explanations assigned for the motives of Machiavel in

The Prince is more groundless than one very early suggested, that by

putting the house of Medici on schemes of tyranny, he was artfully

luring them to their ruin. Whether this could be reckoned an excuse, may

be left to the reader; but we may confidently affirm that it contradicts

the whole tenor of that treatise. And, without palliating the worst

passages, it may be said that few books have been more misrepresented.

It is very far from true, that he advises a tyrannical administration of

government, or one likely to excite general resistance, even to those

whom he thought, or rather knew from experience, to be placed in the

most difficult position for retaining power, by having recently been

exalted to it. The Prince, he repeatedly says, must avoid all that will

render him despicable or odious, especially injury to the property of

citizens, or to their honour.[748] This will leave him nothing to guard

against but the ambition of a few. Conspiracies, which are of little

importance while the people are well affected, become unspeakably

dangerous as soon as they are hostile.[749] Their love, therefore, or at

least the absence of their hatred, is the basis of the governor’s

security, and far better than any fortresses.[750] A wise prince will

honour the nobility, at the same time that he gives content to the

people.[751] If the observance of these maxims is likely to subvert a

ruler’s power, he may be presumed to have designed the ruin of the

Medici. The first duke in the new dynasty of that house, Cosmo I., lived

forty years in the practice of all Machiavel would have advised, for

evil as well as good; and his reign was not insecure.

[748] c. xvii. and xix.

[749] c. xix.

[750] c. xx. la miglior fortezza che sia è non essere odiato de’ popoli.

[751] c. xix.

|But many dangerous.|

37. But much of a darker taint is found in The Prince. Good faith,

justice, clemency, religion, should be ever in the mouth of the ideal

ruler; but he must learn not to fear the discredit of any actions which

he finds necessary to preserve his power.[752] In a new government, it

is impossible to avoid the charge of cruelty; for new states are always

exposed to dangers. Such cruelties perpetrated at the outset and from

necessity, “if we may be permitted to speak well of what is evil,” may

be useful; though when they become habitual and unnecessary, they are

incompatible with the continuance of this species of power.[753] It is

best to be both loved and feared; but if a choice must be made, it

should be of the latter. For men are naturally ungrateful, fickle,

dissembling, cowardly, and will promise much to a benefactor, but desert

him in his need, and will break the bonds of love much sooner than those

of fear. But fear does not imply hatred; nor need a prince apprehend

that, while he abstains from the properties and the wives of his

subjects. Occasions to take the property of others never cease, while

those of shedding blood are rare; and besides, a man will sooner forgive

the death of his father, than the loss of his inheritance.[754]

[752] c. xvi., xviii.

[753] c. viii.

[754] c. xvii.

|Its only palliation.|

38. The eighteenth chapter, on the manner in which princes should

observe faith, might pass for a satire on their usual violations of it,

if the author did not too seriously manifest his approbation of them.

The best palliation of this, and of what else has been justly censured

in Machiavel, is to be derived from his life and times. These led him to

consider every petty government as in a continual state of self-defence

against treachery and violence, from its ill-affected citizens, as well

as from its ambitious neighbours. It is very difficult to draw the

straight line of natural right in such circumstances; and neither

perhaps the cool reader of a remote age, nor the secure subject of a

well-organised community, is altogether a fair arbiter of what has been

done or counselled in days of peril and necessity; relatively, I mean,

to the persons, not to the objective character of actions. There is

certainly a steadiness of moral principle and Christian endurance, which

tells us that it is better not to exist at all, than to exist at the

price of virtue; but few indeed of the countrymen and contemporaries of

Machiavel had any claim to the practice, whatever they might have to the

profession, of such integrity. His crime, in the eyes of the world, and

it was truly a crime, was to have cast away the veil of hypocrisy, the

profession of a religious adherence to maxims which at the same moment

were violated.[755]

[755] Morhof has observed that all the arts of tyranny which we read

in Machiavel, had been unfolded by Aristotle; and Ginguéné has

shown this in some measure from the eleventh chapter of the fifth

book of the latter’s politics. He might also have quoted the

Œconomics; the second book, however, of which, full of the

stratagems and frauds of Dionysius, though nearly of his age, is

not genuine. Mitford, with his usual partiality to tyrants (chap.

xxxi. sect. 8), seems to think them all laudable.

|His discourses on Livy.|

39. The Discourses of Machiavel upon the first books of Livy, though not

more celebrated than The Prince, have been better esteemed. Far from

being exempt from the same bias in favour of unscrupulous politics, they

abound with similar maxims, especially in the third book; but they

contain more sound and deep thinking on the spirit of small republics,

than could be found in any preceding writer that has descended to us;

more probably, in a practical sense, than the Politics of Aristotle,

though they are not so comprehensive. In reasoning upon the Roman

government, he is naturally sometimes misled by confidence in Livy; but

his own acquaintance with modern Italy was in some measure the

corrective that secured him from the errors of ordinary antiquaries.

|Their leading principles.|

40. These discourses are divided into three books, and contain 143

chapters with no great regard to arrangement; written probably as

reflections occasionally presented themselves to the author’s mind. They

are built upon one predominant idea; that the political and military

annals of early Rome having had their counterparts in a great variety of

parallel instances which the recent history of Italy furnished, it is

safe to draw experimental principles from them, and to expect the

recurrence of similar consequences in the same circumstances. This

reasoning, founded upon a single repetition of the event, though it may

easily mislead us, from an imperfect estimate of the conditions, and

does not give a high probability to our anticipations, is such as those

intrusted with the safety of commonwealths ought not to neglect. But

Machiavel sprinkles these discourses with thoughts of a more general

cast, and often applies a comprehensive knowledge of history, and a long

experience of mankind.

41. Permanence, according to Machiavel, is the great aim of

government.[756] In this very common sentiment among writers accustomed

to republican forms, although experience of the mischiefs generally

attending upon change might lead to it, there is, no doubt, a little of

Machiavel’s original taint, the reference of political ends to

the benefit of the rulers rather than that of the community. But the

polity which he seems for the most part to prefer, though he does not

speak explicitly, nor always perhaps consistently, is one wherein the

people should at least have great weight. In one passage he recommends,

like Cicero and Tacitus, the triple form, which endeavours to conciliate

the power of a prince with that of a nobility and a popular assembly; as

the best means of preventing that cycle of revolutions through which, as

he supposes, the simpler institutions would naturally, if not

necessarily, pass; from monarchy to aristocracy, from that to democracy,

and finally to monarchy again; though, as he observes, it rarely happens

that there is time given to complete this cycle, which requires a long

course of ages, the community itself, as an independent state, being

generally destroyed before the close of the period.[757] But, with his

predilection for a republican polity, he yet saw its essential weakness

in difficult circumstances; and hence observes that there is no surer

way to ruin a democracy than to set it on bold undertakings, which it is

sure to misconduct.[758] He has made also the profound and important

remark, that states are rarely either formed, or reformed, except by one

man.[759]

[756] l. i. c. 2.

[757] c. 2 and 6.

[758] c. 53.

[759] c. 9. Corniani, iv. 70, has attempted to reduce into system the

Discourses of Machiavel, which have no regular arrangement, so that

nearly the same thoughts recur in different chapters.

|Their use and influence.|

42. Few political treatises can even now be read with more advantage

than the Discourses of Machiavel; and in proportion as the course of

civil society tends farther towards democracy, and especially if it

should lead to what seems the inevitable consequence of democracy, a

considerable subdivision of independent states, they may acquire an

additional value. The absence of all passion, the continual reference of

every public measure to a distinct end, the disregard of vulgar

associations with names or persons, render him, though too cold of heart

for a very generous reader, a sagacious and useful monitor for any one

who can employ the necessary methods of correcting his theorems. He

formed a school of subtle reasoners upon political history, which, both

in Italy and France, was in vogue for two centuries; and, whatever might

be its errors, has hardly been superseded for the better by the loose

declamation that some dignify with the name of philosophical politics,

and in which we continually find a more flagitious and undisguised

abandonment of moral rules for the sake of some idol of a general

principle, than can be imputed to The Prince of Machiavel.

|His History of Florence.|

43. Besides these two works, the History of Florence is enough to

immortalise the name of Nicolas Machiavel. Seldom has a more giant

stride been made in any department of literature, than by this

judicious, clear, and elegant history: for the preceding historical

works, whether in Italy or out of it, had no claims to the praise of

classical composition, while this has ranked among the greatest of that

order. Machiavel was the first who gave at once a general and a luminous

development of great events in their causes and connections, such as we

find in the first book of his History of Florence. That view of the

formation of European societies, both civil and ecclesiastical, on the

ruins of the Roman empire, though it may seem now to contain only what

is familiar, had never been attempted before, and is still, for its

conciseness and truth, as good as any that can be read.

|Treatises on Venetian government.|

44. The little treatises of Giannotti and Contarini on the republic of

Venice, being chiefly descriptive of actual institutions, though the

former, a Florentine by birth, sometimes reasons upon and even censures

them, would not deserve notice, except as they display an attention to

the workings of a most complicated, and at the same time a most

successful machine. The wonderful permanency, tranquillity, and

prosperity of Venice became the admiration of Europe, and especially, as

was most natural, of Italy; where she stood alone, without internal

usurpation or foreign interference, strong in wisdom more than in arms,

the survivor of many lines of petty princes, and many revolutions of

turbulent democracy, which had, on either side of the Apennine, run

their race of guilt and sorrow for several preceding centuries.[760]

[760] These are both published in Grævius, Thesaur. Antiq. Italiæ.

See too Ginguéné, viii. 186.

|Calvin’s political principles.|

45. Calvin alone, of the reformers in this period, has touched upon

political government as a theme of rational discussion; though he admits

that it is needless to dispute which is the best form of polity, since

private men have not the right of altering that under which they live.

The change from monarchy to despotism, he says, is easy; nor, is that

from aristocracy to the dominion of a few much more difficult; but

nothing is so apt to follow as sedition from a popular regimen.

But upon the whole he considers an aristocratic form to be far better

than the other two, on account of the vices and infirmity of human

nature.[761]

[761] Calv. Inst. l. iv. c. 20, § 8.

SECT. III. 1501-1510.

_Jurisprudence._

|Jurisprudence confined to Roman law.|

46. Under the name of jurisprudence, we are not yet to seek for writings

on that high department of moral philosophy, which treats of the rules

of universal justice, by which positive legislation and the courts of

judicature ought to be directed. Whatever of this kind may appear in

works of this period, arises incidentally out of their subject, and does

not constitute their essence. According to the primary and established

sense of the word, especially on the Continent, jurisprudence is the

science of the Roman law, and is seldom applied to any other positive

system, but least of all to the law of nature. Yet the application of

this study has been too extensive in Europe, and the renown of its chief

writers too high, to admit of our passing wholly over this department of

literature, as we do some technical and professional subjects.

|The laws not well arranged.|

47. The civil or Roman law is comprehended in four leading divisions

(besides some later than the time of Justinian), very unequal in length,

but altogether forming that multifarious collection usually styled the

Corpus Juris Civilis. As this has sometimes been published in a single,

though a vast and closely printed volume, it may seem extraordinary,

that by means of arranged indexes, marginal references, and similar

resources, it was not, soon after it came into use as a standard

authority, or, at least, soon after the invention of printing, reduced

into a less disorderly state than its present disposition exhibits. But

the labours of the oldest jurists, in accumulating glosses or short

marginal interpretations, were more calculated to multiply than to

disentangle the intricacies of the Pandects.

|Adoption of the entire system.|

48. It is at first sight more wonderful, that many nations of Europe,

instead of selecting the most valuable portion of the civil law, as

directory to their own tribunals, should have bestowed decisive

authority on that entire unwieldy body which bore the name of Justinian;

laws, which they could not understand, and which, in great measure,

must, if understood, have been perceived to clash with the new order of

human society. But the homage paid to the Roman name, the previous

reception of the Theodosian code in the same countries, the vague notion

of the Italians, artfully encouraged by one party, that the Conrads and

Frederics were really successors of the Theodosii and Justinians, the

frequent clearness, acuteness, and reasonableness of the decisions of

the old lawyers which fill the Pandects, the immense difficulty of

separating the less useful portion, and of obtaining public authority

for a new system, the deference, above all, to great names, which

cramped every effort of the human mind in the middle ages, will

sufficiently account for the adoption of a jurisprudence so complicated,

uncertain, unintelligible, and ill-fitted to the times.

|Utility of general learning to lawyers.|

49. The portentous ignorance of the earlier jurists in everything that

could aid their textual explanations has been noticed in the first

chapter of this volume. This could not hold out long after the revival

of learning. Budæus, in his Observations on the Pandects, was the first

to furnish better verbal interpretations; but his philological erudition

was not sustained by that knowledge of the laws themselves which nothing

but long labour could impart.[762] Such a knowledge of the Latin

language as even after the revival of letters was given in the schools,

or we may add, as is now obtained by those who are counted learned among

us, serves but little towards the understanding those Roman lawyers,

whose short decisions, or, as we should call them, opinions, occupy the

fifty books of the Pandects. They had not only a technical terminology,

as is perhaps necessary in professional usage, but many words and

phrases not merely technical occur, as to the names and notions of

things, which the classical authors, especially such as are commonly

read, do not contain. Yet these writers of antiquity, when diligently

pursued, throw much light upon jurisprudence; they assist conjecture, if

they do not afford proof, as to the meaning of words; they explain

allusions, they connect the laws with their temporary causes or general

principles; and if they seem a little to lead us astray from the great

object of jurisprudence, the adjudication of right, it was still highly

important, in the conditions that Europe had imposed upon herself, to

ascertain what it was that she had chosen to obey.

[762] Gravina, Origines Jur. Civ. p. 211.

|Alciati; his reform of law.|

50. Ulric Zasias, a professor at Friburg, and Garcia d’Erzilla, whose

commentaries were printed in 1515, should have the credit, according to

Andrès, of leading the way to a more elegant jurisprudence.[763] The

former of these is known, in some measure, as a scholar and a

correspondent of Erasmus; for the latter I have to depend on the

testimony of his countrymen. But the general voice of Europe has always

named Andrew Alciati of Milan as the restorer of the Roman law. He

taught, from the year 1518 to his death in 1550, in the universities of

Avignon, Milan, Bourges, Paris, and Bologna. Literature became with him

the handmaid of law; the historians of Rome, her antiquaries, her

orators and poets, were called upon to elucidate the obsolete words and

obscure allusions of the Pandects; to which, the earlier as well as the

most valuable and extensive portion of the civil law, this method of

classical interpretation is chiefly applicable. Alciati had another

advantage, denied to his predecessors of the middle ages, in the

possession of the Byzantine jurists, with whom, says Gravina, the

learning of Roman law had been preserved in a more perfect state amidst

other vestiges of the empire, and while almost extinguished in Italy by

the barbarians, had been in daily usage at Constantinople down to its

capture. Alciati was the first who taught the lawyers to write with

purity and elegance. Erasmus has applied to him the eulogy of Cicero on

Scævola, that he was the most jurisprudent of orators, and the most

eloquent of lawyers. But he deserved also the higher praise of sweeping

away the rubbish of conflicting glosses, which had so confounded the

students by their contrary subtilties, that it had become a practice to

count, instead of weighing, their authorities. It has been regretted

that he made little use of philosophy in the exposition of law; but this

could not have been attempted in the sixteenth century without the

utmost danger of misleading the interpreter.[764]

[763] Andrès, xvi. 143. Savigny agrees with Andrès as to the merits of

Zasius, and observes that the revival of the study of the laws in

their original sources, instead of the commentators, had been

announced by several signs before the sixteenth century. Ambrogio

Traversari had recommended this, and Lebrixa wrote against the

errors of Accursius, though in a superficial manner. Gesch. des

Römischen Rechts, vi. 364.

[764] Bayle, art. Alciati. Gravina, p. 206. Tiraboschi, ix. 115.

Corniani, v. 57.

|Opposition to him.|

|Agustino.|

51. The practical lawyers, whose prejudices were nourished by their

interests, conspired with the professors of the old school to clamour

against the introduction of literature into jurisprudence. Alciati was

driven sometimes from one university to another by their opposition; but

more frequently his restless disposition and his notorious desire of

gain were the causes of his migrations. They were the means of diffusing

a more liberal course of studies in France as well as Italy, and

especially in the great legal university of Bourges. He stood not

however alone in scattering the flowers of polite literature over the

thorny brakes of jurisprudence. An eminent Spaniard, Antonio Agustino,

might perhaps be placed almost on a level with him. The first work of

Agustino, Emendationes Juris Civilis, was published in 1544. Andrès,

seldom deficient in praising his compatriots, pronounces such an eulogy

on the writings of Agustino, as to find no one but Cujacius worthy of

being accounted his equal, if indeed he does not give the preference in

genius and learning to the older writer.[765] Gravina is less diffusely

panegyrical; and in fact it is certain that Agustino, though a lawyer of

great erudition and intelligence, has been eclipsed by those for whom he

prepared the way.

[765] Vol. xvi. p. 148.

CHAPTER VIII.

HISTORY OF THE LITERATURE OF TASTE IN EUROPE FROM 1520 TO 1550.

SECT. I. 1520-1550.

_Poetry in Italy--In Spain and Portugal--In France and Germany--In

England--Wyatt and Surrey--Latin Poetry._

|Poetry of Bembo.|

1. The singular grace of Ariosto’s poem had not less distinguished it

than his fertility of invention and brilliancy of language. For the

Italian poetry, since the days of Petrarch, with the exception of

Lorenzo and Politian, the boasts of Florence, had been very deficient in

elegance; the sonnets and odes of the fifteenth century, even those

written near its close, by Tibaldeo, Serafino d’Aquila, Benivieni, and

other now obscure names, though the list of poets in Crescimbeni will be

found very long, are hardly mentioned by the generality of critics but

for the purpose of censure; while Boiardo, who deserved most praise for

bold and happy inventions, lost much of it through an unpolished and

inharmonious style. In the succeeding period, the faults of the Italian

school were entirely opposite; in Bembo, and those who, by their

studious and servile imitation of one great master, were called

Petrarchists, there was an elaborate sweetness, a fastidious delicacy, a

harmony of sound, which frequently served as an excuse for coldness of

imagination and poverty of thought. “As the too careful imitation of

Cicero,” says Tiraboschi, “caused Bembo to fall into an affected

elegance in his Latin style, so in his Italian poetry, while he labours

to restore the manner of Petrarch, he displays more of art than of

natural genius. Yet, by banishing the rudeness of former poetry, and

pointing out the right path, he was of no small advantage to those who

knew how to imitate his excellencies and avoid his faults.”[766]

[766] Vol. x. p. 3.

|Its beauties and defects.|

2. The chief care of Bembo was to avoid the unpolished lines which

deformed the poetry of the fifteenth century in the eyes of one so

exquisitely sensible to the charms of diction. It is from him that the

historians of Italian literature date the revival of the Petrarchan

elegance; of which a foreigner, unless conversant with the language in

all its varieties, can hardly judge, though he may perceive the want of

original conception, and the monotony of conventional phrases, which is

too frequently characteristic of the Italian sonnet. Yet the sonnets of

Bembo on the death of his Morosina, the mother of his children, display

a real tenderness not unworthy of his master; and the canzone on that of

his brother has obtained not less renown; though Tassoni, a very

fastidious critic, has ridiculed its centonism, or studious

incorporation of lines from Petrarch; a practice which the habit of

writing Latin poetry, wherein it should be sparingly employed, but not

wholly avoided, would naturally encourage.[767]

[767] Tiraboschi, ibid. Corniani, iv. 102.

|Character of Italian poetry.|

3. The number of versifiers whom Italy produced in the sixteenth century

was immensely great. Crescimbeni gives a list of eighty earlier than

1550, whom he selects from many hundred ever forgotten names. By far the

larger proportion of these confined themselves to the sonnet and the

canzone or ode; and the theme is generally love, though they sometimes

change it to religion. A conventional phraseology, an interminable

repetition of the beauties and coldness of perhaps an ideal, certainly

to us an unknown mistress, run through these productions; which so much

resemble each other, as sometimes to suggest to any one who reads the

Sceltas which bring together many extracts from these poets, no other

parallel than that of the hooting of owls in concert: a sound melancholy

and not unpleasing to all ears in its way, but monotonous,

unintellectual, and manifesting as little real sorrow or sentiment in

the bird as these compositions do in the poet.[768]

[768] Muratori himself observes the tantalising habit in which

sonnetteers indulge themselves, of threatening to die for love,

which never comes to anything; quella volgare smania che mostrano

gl’amanti di voler morire, e che tante volte s’ode in bocca loro,

ma non mai viene ad effetto.

|Alamanni.|

|Vittoria Colonna.|

4. A few exceptions may certainly be made. Alamanni, though the sonnet

is not his peculiar line of strength, and though he often follows the

track of Petrarch with almost servile imitation, could not, with his

powerful genius, but raise himself above the common level. His Lygura

Pianta, a Genoese lady, the heroine of many sonnets, is the shadow of

Laura; but when he turns to the calamities of Italy and his own, that

stern sound is heard again, that almost reminds us of Dante and Alfieri.

The Italian critics, to whom we must of course implicitly defer as to

the grace and taste of their own writers, speak well of Molza, and some

other of the smaller poets; though they are seldom exempt from the

general defects above mentioned. But none does Crescimbeni so much

extol, as a poetess, in every respect the most eminent of her sex in

Italy, the widow of the Marquis of Pescara, Vittoria Colonna, surnamed,

he says, by the public voice, the divine. The rare virtues and

consummate talents of this lady were the theme of all Italy, in that

brilliant age of her literature; and her name is familiar to the

ordinary reader at this day. The canzone dedicated to the memory of her

illustrious husband is worthy of both.[769]

[769] Crescimbeni della Volgar Poesia, vols. ii. and iii. For the

character of Vittoria Colonna, see ii. 360. Roscoe (Leo X. iii.

314) thinks her canzone on her husband in no respect inferior to

that of Bembo on his brother. It is rather by a stretch of

chronology, that this writer reckons Vittoria, Berni, and several

more, among the poets of Leo’s age.

|Satires of Ariosto and Alamanni.|

5. The satires of Ariosto, seven in number, and composed in the Horatian

manner, were published after his death in 1534. Tiraboschi places them

at the head of that class of poetry. The reader will find an analysis of

these satires, with some extracts, in Ginguéné.[770] The twelve satires

of Alamanni, one of the Florentine exiles, of which the first edition is

dated in 1532, though of earlier publication than those of Ariosto,

indicate an acquaintance with them. They are to one another as Horace

and Juvenal, and as their fortunes might lead us to expect; one gay,

easy, full of the best form of Epicurean philosophy, cheerfulness, and

content in the simpler enjoyments of life; the other ardent, scornful,

unsparing, declamatory, a hater of vice, and no great lover of mankind,

pouring forth his moral wrath in no feeble strain. We have seen in

another place his animadversions on the court of Rome; nor does anything

in Italy escape his resentment.[771] The other poems of Alamanni are of

a very miscellaneous description; eclogues, little else than close

imitations of Theocritus and Virgil, elegies, odes, hymns, psalms,

fables, tragedies, and what were called selve, a name for all unclassed

poetry.

[770] ix. 100-129. Corniani, iv. 55. In one passage of the second

satire, Ariosto assumes a tone of higher dignity than Horace

ever ventured, and inveighs against the Italian courts in the

spirit of his rival Alamanni.

[771] The following lines, which conclude the twelfth and last satire,

may serve as a specimen of Alamanni’s declamatory tone of

invective, and his bitter attacks on Rome, whom he is addressing.

O chi vedesse il ver, vedrebbe come

Più disnor tu che ’l tuo Luther Martino

Porti a te stessa, e più gravose some;

Non la Germania, nò, ma l’ocio, il vino,

Avarizia, ambition, lussuria e gola,

Ti mena al fin, che già veggiam vicino.

Non pur questo dico io, non Francia sola,

Non pur la Spagna, tutta Italia ancora

Che ti tien d’heresia, di vizi scuola.

E che nol crede, ne dimandi ogn’ora

Urbin, Ferrara, l’Orso, e la Colonna,

La Marca, il Romagnuol, ma più che plora

Per te servendo, che fù d’Altri donna.

|Alamanni.|

|Rucellai.|

|Trissino.|

6. Alamanni’s epic, or rather romantic poem, the Avarchide, is admitted

by all critics to be a work of old age, little worthy of his name. But

his poem on agriculture, la Coltivazione, has been highly extolled. A

certain degree of languor seems generally to hang on Italian blank

verse; and in didactic poetry it is not likely to be overcome. The Bees

of Rucellai is a poem written with exquisite sweetness of style; but the

critics have sometimes forgotten to mention, that it is little else than

a free translation from the fourth Georgic.[772] No one has ever

pretended to rescue from the charge of dulness and insipidity the epic

poem of the father of blank verse, Trissino, on the liberation of Italy

from the Goths by Belisarius. It is, of all long poems that are

remembered at all, the most unfortunate in its reputation.

[772] Roscoe’s Leo, iii. 351. Tiraboschi, x. 85. Algarotti, and

Corniani (v. 116), who quotes him, do not esteem the poem of

Rucellai highly.

|Berni.|

7. A very different name is that of Berni, partly known by his ludicrous

poetry, which has given that style the appellation of Poesia Bernesca,

rather on account of his excellence than originality, for nothing is so

congenial to the Italians,[773] but far more by his _rifaccimento_,

or remoulding of the poem of Boiardo. The Orlando Innamorato, an

ill-written poem, especially to Tuscan ears, had been encumbered by the

heavy continuation of Agostini. Yet if its own intrinsic beauties of

invention would not have secured it from oblivion, the vast success of

the Orlando Furioso, itself only a continuation, and borrowing most of

its characters from Boiardo’s poem, must have made it impossible for

Italians of any curiosity to neglect the primary source of so much

delight. Berni, therefore, undertook the singular office of writing over

again the Orlando Innamorato, preserving the sense of almost every

stanza, though every stanza was more or less altered, and inserting

nothing but a few introductory passages, in the manner of Ariosto, to

each canto.[774] The genius of Berni, playful, satirical, flexible, was

admirably fitted to perform this labour; the rude Lombardisms of the

lower Po gave way to the racy idiom of Florence; and the Orlando

Innamorato has descended to posterity as the work of two minds,

remarkably combined in this instance; the sole praise of invention,

circumstance, description, and very frequently that of poetical figure

and sentiment, belonging to Boiardo: that of style, in the peculiar and

limited use of the word, to Berni. The character of the poem, as thus

adorned, has sometimes been misconceived. Though Berni is almost always

sprightly, he is not, in this romance, a burlesque or buffoon poet.[775]

I once heard Foscolo prefer him to Ariosto. A foreigner, not so familiar

with the peculiarities of language, would probably think his style less

brilliant and less pellucid; and it is in execution alone that he claims

to be considered as an original poet. The Orlando Innamorato was also

remoulded by Domenichi in 1545; but the excellence of Berni has caused

this feeble production to be nearly passed over by the Italian

critics.[776]

[773] Corniani, iv. 252. Roscoe, iii. 323.

[774] The first edition of the Rifaccimento is in 1541, and the second

in 1542. In that of 1545, the first eighty-two stanzas are very

different from those that correspond in former editions; some that

follow are suspected not to be genuine. It seems that we have no

edition on which we can wholly depend. No edition of Berni appeared

from 1545 to 1725, though Domenichi was printed several times. This

reformer of Boiardo did not alter the text nearly so much as Berni.

Panizzi, vol. ii.

[775] Tiraboschi, vii. 195, censures Berni for “motti e racconti troppo

liberi ed empi, che vi ha inseriti.” Ginguéné exclaims, as well he

may, against this imputation. Berni has inserted no stories; and

unless it were the few stanzas that remain at the head of the

twentieth canto, it is hard to say what Tiraboschi meant by

impieties. But though Tiraboschi must have read Berni, he has here

chosen to copy Zeno, who talks of “il poema di Boiardo, rifatto dal

Berni, e di serio trasformato in ridicolo, e di onesto in

iscandoloso, e però giustamente dannato dallo chiesa.” (Fontanini,

p. 273). Zeno, even more surely than Tiraboschi, was perfectly

acquainted with Berni’s poem: how could he give so false a

character of it? Did he copy some older writer? And why? It seems

hard not to think that some suspicion of Berni’s bias towards

Protestantism had engendered a prejudice against his poem, which

remained when the cause had been forgotten, as it certainly was in

the days of Zeno and Tiraboschi.

[776] “The ingenuity,” says Mr. Panizzi, “with which Berni finds a

resemblance between distant objects, and the rapidity with which he

suddenly connects the most remote ideas; the solemn manner in which

he either alludes to ludicrous events or utters an absurdity; the

air of innocence and naïveté with which he presents remarks full of

shrewdness and knowledge of the world; that peculiar bonhommie with

which he seems to look kindly and at the same time unwillingly on

human errors or wickedness; the keen irony which he uses with so

much appearance of simplicity and aversion to bitterness; the

seeming singleness of heart with which he appears anxious to excuse

men and actions, at the very moment that he is most inveterate in

exposing them; these are the chief elements of Berni’s poetry. Add

to this the style, the loftiness of the verse contrasting with the

frivolity of the argument, the gravest conception expressed in the

most homely manner; the seasonable use of strange metaphors and of

similes sometimes sublime, and for this very reason the more

laughable, when considered with relation to the subject which they

are intended to illustrate, form the most remarkable features of

his style.” P. 120.

“Any candid Italian scholar who will peruse the Rifaccimento of

Berni with attention, will be compelled to admit that, although

many parts of the poem of Boiardo have been improved in that work,

such has not always been the case; and will moreover be convinced

that some parts of the Rifaccimento, besides those suspected in

former times, are evidently either not written by Berni, or have

not received from him, if they be his, such corrections as to be

worthy of their author.” P. 141. Mr. P. shows in several passages

his grounds for this suspicion.

|Spanish poets.|

|Boscan. Garcilasso.|

8. Spain now began to experience one of those revolutions in fashionable

taste, which await the political changes of nations. Her native poetry,

whether Castilian or Valencian, had characteristics of its own, that

placed it in a different region from the Italian. The short heroic,

amatory, or devotional songs, which the Peninsular dialects were

accustomed to exhibit, were too ardent, too hyperbolical for a taste

which, if not correctly classical, was at least studious of a grace not

easily compatible with extravagance. But the continual intercourse of

the Spaniards with Italy, partly subject to their sovereign, and the

scene of his wars, accustomed their nobles to relish the charms of a

sister language, less energetic, but more polished than their own. Two

poets, Boscan and Garcilasso de la Vega, brought from Italy the softer

beauties of amorous poetry, embodied in the regular sonnet, which had

hitherto been little employed in the Peninsula. These poems seem not to

have been printed till 1543, when both Boscan and Garcilasso were dead,

and their new school had already met with both support and opposition at

the court of Valladolid. The national character is not entirely lost in

these poets; love still speaks with more impetuous ardour, with more

plaintive sorrow, than in the contemporary Italians; but the restraints

of taste and reason are perceived to control his voice. An eclogue of

Garcilasso, called Salicio and Nemoroso, is pronounced by the Spanish

critics to be one of the finest works in their language. It is sadder

than the lament of saddest nightingales. We judge of all such poetry

differently in the progressive ages of life.

|Mendoza.|

9. Diego Mendoza, one of the most remarkable men for variety of talents

whom Spain has produced, ranks with Boscan and Garcilasso as a

reformer of Castilian poetry. His character as a soldier, as the severe

governor of Siena, as the haughty minister of Charles at the court of

Rome and the council at Trent, is notorious in history.[777] His

epistles, in an Horatian style, full of a masculine and elevated

philosophy, though deficient in harmony and polish, are preferred to his

sonnets; a species of composition where these faults are more

perceptible; and for which, at least in the style then popular, the

stern understanding of Mendoza seems to have been ill adapted. “Though

he composed,” says Bouterwek, “in the Italian manner with less facility

than Boscan and Garcilasso, he felt more correctly than they or any

other of his countrymen the difference between the Spanish and Italian

languages, with respect to their capabilities for versification. The

Spanish admits of none of those pleasing elisions, which, particularly

when terminating vowels are omitted, render the mechanism of Italian

versification so easy, and enable the poet to augment or diminish the

number of syllables according to his pleasure; and this difference in

the two languages renders the composition of a Spanish sonnet a

difficult task. Still more does the Spanish language seem hostile to the

soft termination of a succession of feminine rhymes, for the Spanish

poet, who adopts this rule of the Italian sonnet, is compelled to banish

from his rhymes all infinitives of verbs, together with a whole host of

sonorous substantives and adjectives. Mendoza therefore availed himself

of the use of masculine rhymes in his sonnets; but this metrical licence

was strongly censured by all partizans of the Italian style.

Nevertheless, had he given to his sonnets more of the tenderness of

Petrarch, it is probable that they would have found imitators. Some of

them, indeed, may be considered as successful productions, and

throughout all the language is correct and noble.”[778]

[777] Sadolet, in one of his epistles dated 1532 (lib. vi. p. 309 edit.

1554), gives an interesting character of Mendoza, then young, who

had visited him at Carpentras on his way to Rome; a journey

undertaken solely for the sake of learning.

[778] P. 198.

|Saa di Miranda.|

10. The lyric poems of Mendoza, written in the old national style,

tacitly improved and polished, are preferred by the Spaniards to his

other works. Many of them are printed in the Romancero General. Saa di

Miranda, though a Portuguese, has written much in Castilian, as well as

in his own language. Endowed by nature with the melancholy temperament

akin to poetic sensibility, he fell readily into the pastoral strain,

for which his own language is said to be peculiarly formed. The greater

and better part of his eclogues, however, are in Castilian. He is said

to have chosen the latter language for imagery, and his own for

reflection.[779] Of this poet, as well as of his Castilian contemporaries,

the reader will find a sufficient account in Bouterwek and Sismondi.

[779] Bouterwek, p. 240. Sismondi.

|Ribeyro.|

11. Portugal, however, produced one who did not abandon her own soft and

voluptuous dialect, Ribeyro; the first distinguished poet she could

boast. His strains are chiefly pastoral, the favourite style of his

country, and breathe that monotonous and excessive melancholy, with

which it requires some congenial emotion of our own to sympathise. A

romance of Ribeyro, Menina e Moça, is one of the earliest among the few

specimens of noble prose which we find in that language. It is said to

be full of obscure allusions to real events in the author’s life, and

cannot be read with much interest; but some have thought that it is the

prototype of the Diana of Montemayor, and the whole school of pastoral

romance, which was afterwards admired in Europe for an entire century.

We have however seen that the Arcadia of Sannazzaro has the priority;

and I am not aware that there is any specific distinction between that

romance and this of Ribeyro. It should be here observed, that Ribeyro

should perhaps have been mentioned before; his eclogues seem to have

been written and possibly published, before the death of Emanuel in

1521. The romance however was a later production.[780]

[780] Bouterwek, Hist. of Portuguese Liter., p. 24. Sismondi, iv. 280.

|French poetry.|

|Marot.|

12. The French versifiers of the age of Francis I. are not few. It does

not appear that they rise above the level of the preceding reigns, Louis

XI., Charles VIII., and Louis XII.; some of them mistaking insipid

allegory for the creations of fancy, some tamely describing the events

of their age, others, with rather more spirit, satirising the vices of

mankind, and especially of the clergy; while many, in little songs,

expressed their ideal love with more perhaps of conventional gallantry

than passion or tenderness,[781] yet with some of those light and

graceful touches which distinguish this style of French poetry.

Clément Marot ranks far higher. The psalms of Marot, though famous in

their day, are among his worst performances. His distinguishing

excellence is a naïveté, or pretended simplicity, of which it is the

highest praise to say, that it was the model of La Fontaine. This style

of humour, than which nothing is more sprightly or diverting, seems much

less indigenous among ourselves, if we may judge by our older

literature, than either among the French or Italians.

[781] Goujet, Bibliothèque Française vols. x. and xi. passim. Auguis,

Recueil des Anciens Poëtes Français, vols. ii. and iii.

|Their metrical structure.|

13. In the days of Marot, French poetry had not put on all its chains.

He does not observe the regular alternation of masculine and feminine

rhymes, nor scruple the open vowel, the suppression of a mute e before a

consonant in scanning the verse, the carrying on the sense, without a

pause, to the middle of the next line. These blemishes, as later usage

accounts them, are common to Marot with all his contemporaries. In

return, they dealt much in artificial schemes of recurring words or

lines, as the chant royal, where every stanza was to be in the same

rhyme, and to conclude with the same verse; or the rondeau, a very

popular species of metre long afterwards, wherein two or three initial

words were repeated at the refrain or close of every stanza.[782]

[782] Goujet, Bibl. Française, xi. 36. Gaillard, Vie de François I.,

vii. 20. Pasquier, Recherches de la France, l. vii. c. 5. Auguis,

vol. iii.

|German poetry.|

|Hans Sachs.|

14. The poetical and imaginative spirit of Germany, subdued as it had

long been, was never so weak as in this century. Though we cannot say

that this poverty of genius was owing to the Reformation, it is certain

that the Reformation aggravated very much in this sense the national

debasement. The controversies were so scholastic in their terms, so

sectarian in their character, so incapable of alliance with any warmth

of soul, that, so far as their influence extended, and that was to a

large part of the educated classes, they must have repressed every poet,

had such appeared, by rendering the public insensible to his

superiority. The meister-singers were sufficiently prosaic in their

original constitution; they neither produced, nor perhaps would have

suffered to exhibit itself, any real excellence in poetry. But they

became in the sixteenth century still more rigorous in their

requisitions of a mechanical conformity to rule; while at the same time

they prescribed a new code of law to the versifier, that of theological

orthodoxy. Yet one man, of more brilliant fancy and powerful feeling

than the rest, Hans Sachs, the shoemaker of Nuremberg, stands out from

the crowd of these artizans. Most conspicuous as a dramatic writer, his

copious muse was silent in no line of verse. Heinsius accounts the

bright period of Hans Sachs’s literary labours to have been from 1530 to

1538; though he wrote much both sooner and after that time. His poems of

all kinds are said to have exceeded six thousand; but not more than

one-fourth of them are in print. In this facility of composition he is

second only to Lope de Vega; and it must be presumed that, uneducated,

unread, accustomed to find his public in his own class, so wonderful a

fluency was accompanied by no polish, and only occasionally by gleams of

vigour and feeling. The German critics are divided concerning the genius

of Hans Sachs: Wieland and Goethe gave him lustre at one time by their

eulogies; but these having been as exaggerated as the contempt of a

former generation, the place of the honest and praiseworthy shoemaker

seems not likely to be fixed very high; and there has not been demand

enough for his works, which are very scarce, to encourage their

republication.[783]

[783] Heinsius, iv. 150. Bouterwek, ix. 381. Retrospective Review,

vol. x.

|German hymns.|

15. The Germans, constitutionally a devout people, were never so much so

as in this first age of protestantism. And this, in combination with

their musical temperament, displayed itself in the peculiar line of

hymns. No other nation has so much of this poetry. At the beginning of

the eighteenth century, the number of religious songs was reckoned at

33,000, and that of their authors at 500. Those of Luther have been more

known than the rest; they are hard and rude, but impressive and deep.

But this poetry, essentially restrained in its flight, could not develop

the creative powers of genius.[784]

[784] Bouterwek. Heinsius.

|Theuerdanks of Pfintzing.|

16. Among the few poems of this age none has been so celebrated as the

Theuerdanks of Melchior Pfintzing, secretary to the emperor Maximilian;

a poem at one time attributed to the master, whose praises it records,

instead of the servant. This singular work, published originally in

1517, with more ornament of printing and delineation than was usual, is

an allegory, with scarce any spirit of invention or language; wherein

the knight Theuerdanks, and his adventures in seeking the

marriage of the princess Ehrreich, represent the memorable union of

Maximilian with the heiress of Burgundy. A small number of German poets

are commemorated by Bouterwek and Heinsius, superior no doubt in ability

to Pfintzing, but so obscure in our eyes, and so little extolled by

their countrymen, that we need only refer to their pages.

|English poetry. Lyndsay.|

17. In the earlier part of this period of thirty years, we can find very

little English poetry. Sir David Lyndsay, an accomplished gentleman and

scholar of Scotland, excels his contemporary Skelton in such qualities,

if not in fertility of genius. Though inferior to Dunbar in vividness of

imagination and in elegance of language, he shows a more reflecting and

philosophical mind; and certainly his satire upon James V. and his court

is more poignant than the other’s panegyric upon the Thistle. But in the

ordinary style of his versification he seems not to rise much above the

prosaic and tedious rhymers of the fifteenth century. His descriptions

are as circumstantial without selection as theirs; and his language,

partaking of a ruder dialect, is still more removed from our own. The

poems of Lyndsay were printed in 1540, and are among the very

first-fruits of the Scottish press; but one of these, the Complaint of

the Papingo, had appeared in London two years before. Lyndsay’s poetry

is said to have contributed to the Reformation in Scotland; in which,

however, he is but like many poets of his own and preceding times. The

clergy were an inexhaustible theme of bitter reproof.

|Wyatt and Surrey.|