taste, it is another thing to instruct, enlarge and ad- CHAP. vance. The scholar will feast on the Virgilian graces; LITERA TURE AFTER THE but they alone would leave the young student almost REVIVAL as barren and as ignorant as they found him; his OF LATIN mental growth demands more substantial and more affluent, tho coarser, nutriment; and if he be confined to the diet of the Roman classics, he will not be CONQUEST. more informed nor more productive than the authors we are considering. NORMAN their ancient Hence, when the Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Franks, and of and other Gothic nations, had transplanted into their own, all the Roman mind which its writers had. imitators. perpetuated; tho their scholars, thus far accomplished, learned to write Latin, often with elegance and correct prosody, and acquired from it a cultivation which made them like moons in a benighted age, yet their borrowed light spread but feebly around them, and was not transmissible to future times. Aldhelm, Bede, Alcuin, Erigena, Lanfranc, Anselm, Iscanus, Jeffry, Becket, John of Salisbury, and many others of a similar class, altho displaying the utmost improvement of mind, which an education formed on the Roman literature could impart, and not inferior in native talent to any Roman writer of the later periods of the empire; yet are so inferior to our ideas of excellence, and so deficient in our accumulated knowlege, that their best compositions we think of with disdain, and never deign to unfold. vium and The trivium and quadrivium-the terms, within The triwhich the sciences of the middle age were comprised quadri-awake our contempt the moment they occur, be- vium. cause they recall the image of barbarian ages, and seem to be the drivelling pedantry of barbarian ignorance. But let our ancestors have their proper merit: VI. ENGLAND. 68 BOOK altho to us they are pigmies, they were not so to their predecessors. The studies implied by these two LITERARY monastic vocables, and in the two jargon hexameters HISTORY OF that define the subjects they comprised, conveyed all that the Romans knew, cultivated or taught. They comprised the whole encyclopedia of the ancient knowlege. The books from which they were learnt, were the best treatises which the Roman empire possessed upon them. Confined indeed was the knowlege they conveyed; and our emulous forefathers were but feeble thinkers, when they had mastered them all; but in possessing themselves of these, they acquired the knowlege which their Roman teachers had enjoyed. When they had finished the circuit of the trivium and quadrivium, they had transferred all the intellect of the Roman empire into their own; and if knowlege be the criterion of their merit, the good scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were not inferior to those of Rome after the age of Tacitus and Quintilian. In taste and elegance, and polished genius, it would be absurd to compare them with the ornaments of the Augustan age; but these authors were in the third century beyond the approach of their own countrymen; and it is therefore no disgrace to the middle ages, that their inferiority was not dissimilar. Improved The truth seems to be, that the classical minds intellected whom we are accustomed to venerate, were not not formed by study formed merely from the literature that preceded them, but from the general intellect, business, conversation, and pursuits of their day. It is a mistake to imagine that a man of great intellectual eminence is made only. 68 Gramm. loquitur; Dia. vera docet; Rhet, verba colorat: Mus. canit; Ar. numerat; Geo. ponderat; Ast. colit astra. · 11. OF LATIN LITERA AFTER THE NORMAN only from his library; he is the creature of the im- CHAP. provement of society about him, reflecting upon him the rays of a thousand minds, and pouring into him REVIVAL information from a thousand quarters; every hour his understanding, if it has the capacity, is insensibly TURE directed, enriched and exercised, by the knowlege and talent that is every where breathing, acting and CONQUEST. conferring around him; his mind expands, without his own consciousness of its enlargement; his ideas multiply independently of his will; his judgment rectifies; his moral or political wisdom increases with his experience; and he becomes at last a model imperceptibly benefiting others, as he has benefited himself. declines when Thus Cicero, Tacitus, and Thucydides, were formed, Literature as well as Scipio, Epaminondas, and Cæsar. But as soon as moral and political degeneracy had withered society dethe Roman mind, and voluptuousness had corrupted generates. it, the intellectual tone and affluence of their improved 69 society ceased. Instead of that cultivated and active talent, which, from the Letters of Tully, we see that at least some high-minded Romans once possessed, a debased, sordid, sensual, illiterate mind appeared, valuing nothing buta babbling rhetoric, which might from an age of imbecility procure food for its vanity, or minister to its selfishness. Such a state of intellect and literature, our Gothic ancestors found in the Roman provinces, which they subdued; and tho they at last collected into their libraries the works of the nobler minds of this deteriorated race, yet the books without the living education benefited little 69 Cicero, in a fine passage, which lord Bacon has cited, distinguishes the ancient Romans as transcending all other nations in their steady love of religion; and Polybius ascribes the great corruption of Roman manners to their increasing disbelief of a future state. BOOK and unless new revolutions had disclosed new sources VI. of improvement, and created a new spirit of activity, LITERARY cultivation, discussion and thought, the human mind would still have remained as dwarfed and barren, as monotonous and feeble, as it was in all the writers of the middle ages, who drank only at the fountains of the Latin Muses.70 HISTORYOF Latin lite rature not fitted for But the Roman literature, whatever be the amount of its intrinsic merits, was manifestly insufficient for popular in the progress of the human intellect, from two other circumstances its limited diffusion, and its tendency to prevent originality of thought. struction. As the Latin language was not the common language of society in England, its instructive operation was confined to the monastic and clerical body. It gave no improvement to the nobleman, the knight, the yeoman, the merchant, the vassál, or the burgher, who could not understand it; their ignorance remained undiminished. Amid all the seminaries of study, they could know no more than their spiritual guides chose to impart; and how scanty the dole of knowlege from the papal hierarchy to the populace, has always been, not only the middle ages, but our own times attest. If, then, the Latin literature had continued to be the only study in England, the ecclesiastical 70 That England is not indebted to the Latin writers for its mathema tical knowlege, we may see from John of Salisbury. He says, that in his time, the twelfth century," Geometry is very little attended to amongst us, and is only studied by some people in Spain, Egypt, and Arabia, for the sake of astronomy." Metalog. 1. 4. c. 6. 71 That the nobility were unacquainted with Latin in the time of HenryII. we find from the speech of the earl of Arundel to the Pope. He was one of the commissioners sent by Henry, with some other great barons, and several prelates, to the pontiff. His mission would imply that the most informed nobles had been selected. The bishops made their address in Latin. The earl then began in English, "My lord! what the bishops have spoken to you, we illiterate laymen do not at all understand: We will therefore tell you for ourselves, why we are sent." - Vita Becket. 1. 2. c. 9. p. 74. OF LATIN bodies would have been so many Christian druids; CHAP. so many British bramins; the only informed portion of an ignorant community; whom they would learn REVIVAL to despise, from not condescending to enlighten; LITERA whom, too anxious to govern, they would have de- TURE bilitated and degraded. But the most injurious effect, from the exclusive or too long-continued study of the Latin literature, was its tendency to preclude the evolution of genius, and the formation of original thought. AFTER THE NORMAN CONQUEST. able to the original genius. It has been remarked, in the history of literature, Unfavor that great excellence has been usually followed by rise of decline. No second Augustan age is found to occur. A Virgil emerges, and, as if his genius cast on his countrymen an everlasting spell, no future Virgil appears-no second Homer, or Euripides—no succeeding Pindar, Horace, Demosthenes, Thucydides, Tacitus, or Cicero. The fact is remarkable; but it is to be accounted for, not by a deficiency in the birth of talent, but from its subsequent destruction by injudicious education. It is in literature as in painting: if we study departed excellence too intently, we only imitate; we extinguish genius, and sink below our models. If we make ourselves but copyists, we become inferior to those we copy. The exclusive or continual contemplation of preceding merit, contracts our faculties within, and greatly within, its peculiar circle, and makes even that degree of excellence unattain able, which we admire and feed upon: we become mimics, instead of being competitors; mannerists, instead of originals: we are enslaved by a despotism from which we ought to have revolted. Whence arises this strange, but oft-experienced |