buted, or so preposterously confused; and the consequent advantage to intellectual cultivation corresponding with that which manual opérations derive from a division of labor. §. 3. If, then, the Crusades had been thus instrumental only in removing a positive obstacle to the cultivation of knowlege, the beneficial tendency of their influence would have been sufficiently established. But they were more than negatively useful. In contributing to obliterate the traces of an exclusively military character, they gradually substituted habits which were as decidedly beneficial to arts and literature as those which they supplanted had been injurious. The difference of natural productions in different climates, and the benefits of exchange, though not unknown to the Europeans before the Crusades, were rendered strikingly apparent during their long residence in the East. They acquired, moreover, a taste for distant excursions, and a knowlege of local peculiarities. Commerce too, especially maritime, was promoted by the necessity of supplies for the Crusaders, and the privileges secured by the holy wars to mercantile speculation. When, therefore, the love of military renown declined throughout Europe, the spirit of adventure was gradually directed to the pursuit of wealth. The commercial character, which before had been subordinate to the military, was thus extended and confirmed by the Crusades, till at length it became the distinguishing feature of Europe. The facilities and refinements of navigation, including, of course, the discovery of the compass, were among the earliest attendants of improving commerce; and, as the means of still further acquisitions, may be regarded as the most important. Then follow all those arts of utility and convenience by which the productions of nature are applied or improved. The arts of weaving and dying, the manufacture of paper, and the application of printing have been attributed, each in its turn, to the Crusades, but were in fact only the indirect results of those expeditions through the medium of increasing Industry and Commerce. If, however, to the discoveries already enumerated we add the composition of gunpowder, each higher department of active life, the commercial, the literary, and the military, will appear furnished, soon after the Crusades, with its own peculiar instrumental art. Again, the results of Commerce, wealth, and luxury, were equally favorable to the cultivation of elegant knowlege. We need not refer to the comparative refinement of Athens and Lacedæmon in order to prove the benefits which intellectual cultivation derives from wealth. Modern Italy suggests a more appropriate example. That country was at once the most commercial in Europe, and As in the "Miles Clericus." 2 Robertson, America, India, Charles V. the earliest to awaken the genius of Painting and Sculpture, of Poetry and elegant Literature. It was the first to display the beneficial effects of the Crusades, because it had the greatest predisposition to favor that peculiar character of which the Crusades were productive. Even before the eleventh century, had Commerce, despised in more chivalrous regions as the dull and unpoetical pursuit of ordinary minds, found a home on the shores of Italy, and introduced comparative refinement at Genoa, Venice, and Amalfi. Since Italy was the country whence the knowlege of modern Europe, especially that of an elegant character, originated, it is important to ascertain that the commercial effects of the Crusades were there principally discernible. But the whole of Europe speedily experienced the same beneficial results. We hear soon after the Crusades, of more magnificence in the structure of palaces, and a more refined taste in their decorations. Luxury and the arts now fostered each other. By the decline, too, of the feudal system, the benefits of monarchical patronage were secured to the efforts of genius and the cultivation of taste. The progress of literature was widely different from that of the arts. Here the imagination was exercised, before the understanding was matured. Modern Poetry, which began with Dante, was long antecedent to modern Philosophy; so long, indeed, that it may seem almost fanciful to refer the great improvement of the reasoning powers in the sixteenth century to the influence of the Crusades in the thirteenth. But the springs even of this intellectual action, however tardy or complicated in their operation, may be traced to that expedition which first called forth the energies of Europe, and promoted a spirit of unprejudiced inquiry. To sum up the argument. The Crusades have seemed destitute neither of direct, nor of indirect, influence on the Arts and Literature of Europe. Their immediate influence, however, has appeared on investigation to have beeu in character subordinate, and in extent limited; but their remote and indirect results, to have been primarily and permanently beneficial to Europe. On the whole it may be concluded, that, while the Crusades were, according to human calculation, ill adapted to produce any intellectual results, they were rendered accidentally, or, as we may rather say, providentially, an unforeseen, but to future ages easily discernible cause of acceleration to the age of restored learning and original invention. It remains to consider the arguments adduced to prove that the Crusades, so far from having exercised a favorable influence on the intellectual state of Europe, were instrumental in retarding the progress of learning and refinement. Of these objections to the view at present taken of the question, some have been already considered, and most will be met by the general plan which has been adopted, of regarding the Crusades as the remote and not the immediate cause of a beneficial influence. But two questions of some interest remain to be examined. The destruction of so many valuable monuments of ancient learning and taste at Constantinople, although not strictly a consequence of the Crusades, it may fairly be said would not have taken place but for those expeditions. Writers have, therefore, deviated from the subject of the Crusades, to comment with unmeasured abhorrence on the savage fury of those barbarians who viewed with complacency the demolition they had caused. But it has been well remarked, that the knowlege of modern Europe, had it been less her own, would have been less permanent and effectual. Enough of classic art and literature still remained to facilitate and direct the exertions of Europe without depriving them of the merit and the advantages of originality. The chaos of the dark ages was the best foundation of the newly-created intellectual universe; but the materials of a former world might aptly be introduced to complete and beautify the fabric which they could not have supported. The Crusaders, then, might unconsciously have done service to future arts and literature, by destroying those superabundant models, which would have cramped the genius, before they could have refined the taste, of European imitators. The tendency of the Crusades to increase the power of the Church is a still more specious objection. It cannot be denied that the treasury of the Church was enriched, and its influence extended, by the holy wars; and it is equally unquestionable that this newly-acquired wealth and influence were employed forthwith to check the progress of inquiry, and to extend the empire of superstition. The Cross, which had hitherto been raised as the ensign of intolerance against infidelity alone, was now assumed to extirpate heresy; and whatever of Scriptural doctrine or Apostolic discipline had under that name been preserved free from contagion in the Valdensian or Albigensian churches, was opposed with a violence which the yet prevailing spirit of the Crusades alone could have projected or carried into execution. But here, as elsewhere, we must recur to the distinction so often made between the immediate and the remote consequences of the Crusades. The ecclesiastical power eventually sank under its own weight; and the Crusades were among those causes which contributed to weaken the foundations of the structure, by adding to its encumbrances. Moreover, they rendered palpable and intolerable those particular errors, by the exposure of which the Reformation was effected. The sale of indulgences was brought to its height by the Crusades; and this was the very corruption which provoked the indignation of Luther. Thus then to the Crusades we may not unfairly ascribe the acceleration of that great event, which was at once the most important consequence of restored learning, and the surest guarantee for its continuance. Whatever cause, therefore, we may find, in the origin and progress of the Crusades, to reprobate the operation of unwarrantable motives, or to deplore the effects of misguided zeal, we can scarcely fail to acknowlege, in the final disposition of events, the subservience of human weakness to the ends of Divine Wisdom and Goodness. Amid scenes of plunder and bloodshed, in the country of infidels or enemies, were sown, unconsciously, the seeds of intellectual greatness, which were ultimately to ripen into an abundant harvest. The fruit, now matured, may return to its parent earth with additional promise.-In the progress of ages, Europe has obtained that ascendency in knowlege and refinement, whereby she may be enabled to dispel from the face of other nations the darkness in which she was herself formerly enveloped. To that Eastern hemisphere, especially, whence she first derived the light of learning and civilisation, and whence, at a later period, she drew the materials of a character which prepared her for still greater accessions of knowlege;-thither, from the fulness of her own intellectual meridian, she may now return, and kindle a brighter light than she received! The champions of her Religion may now too, as of old, unfurl the banner of the Cross; which, however, to those, who from distant lands descry its approach, shall no longer seem the standard of war and desolation, but the harbinger of glad tidings, and the symbol of universal peace. FREDERICK OAKELEY, FELLOW OF BALLIOL College. NUGE. No. XXII. [Continued from No. LXXIV.] 1. ARISTOT. Poet. xxvi. Buhle. (xlvi. Tyrwhitt.) Tà gos τὴν λέξιν ὁρῶντα (ἁμαρτήματα) δεῖ διαλύειν—διαιρέσει· οἷον Εμπεδοκλῆς· Αἶψα δὲ θνητ ̓ ἐφύοντο, τὰ πρὶν μάθον ἀθάνατ ̓ εἶναι, Ζωρά τε τὰ πρὶν κέκρατο. " Codd. collati omnes, Ζωά τε πρὶν κέκριτο (Codd. Ven. Paris. 1741. xéxgnto).-Victorius primus in textu exhibuit Ζωρά τε retinuit tamen πρὶν κέκριτο. Veriorem lectionem restituit- Madius ex Athen. Dipnos. x. p. 423 F. et Simplic. ad Arist. Ausc. Phys. fol. 7. b. apud quos fragmentum Physicorum Empedoclis, ex quo versus illi desumti sunt, auctius legitur sic: Αἶψα δὲ θνήτ ̓ ἐφύοντο, τὰ πρὶν μάθον ἀθάνατ ̓ εἶναι, Madium secuti sunt Heinsius et Reizius, qui habent ζωρά τε τὰ πρὶν ἄκρητα. - Pro κέκριτο dedit Batteusius κέκρατο" et sic legendum esse censet quoque Tyrwhittus, quoniam ζωρὰ et ἄκρητα nullam inter se conversionem pati possunt, cum prorsus eadem sint. Enimvero lis fuit inter veteres ipsos, quonam significatu vox ζωρα sit accipienda. Theophrastus ἐν τῷ περὶ μέθης secundum Athenæum l. 1. τὸ ζωρὸν non ἄκρατον sed κεκραμένον, non purum, sed mixtum, significare voluit; cui tamen interpretationi vix alii adstipulati sunt, cum alias Tò pòv semper in Græco sermone, etiam apud Homerum, purum denotaverit. Sic utique melior lectio esset ζωρά τε τὰ πρὶν κέκρατο, quam equidem in textum recepi.” Buhle in loc. Sturz, in his Commentatio de Empedoclis Vita et Philosophia, p. 578. reads ζωρά τε τὰ πρὶν ἄκρητα, and quotes Theophrastus, Plutarch, and Eustathius, to prove that ζωρà is synonymous with κεκραμένα. Of the above three readings, Buhle's is destructive of the metre: Tyrwhitt's, ζωρά τε πρὶν κέκρατο, (or rather κέκρητο, on account of the dialect, and because the transformation of κέκρητο into xéxpiro is more easily explicable, on the ground of iotacism, than that of κέκρατο into κέκριτο,) seems to us objectionable, inasmuch as it does not involve in it any ambiguity of the kind specified by Aristotle; at least, we do not think that any Greek of Aristotle's time could have hesitated as to the meaning of the words. With regard to the third reading, ζωρά τε τὰ πρὶν ἄκρητα, it seems to be questionable whether Empedocles would have shortened the & before xp; though on this point we speak with hesitation. Quere, ζωρά τε τὰ πρὶν κρητά? By thus correcting, we shall not only obviate the difficulties above mentioned, but likewise satisfy the scruples of those who think that there is no sufficient reason for attributing two contradictory meanings to ζωρός. We subjoin the entire fragment, partly from Sturz's emendation. It reminds us (as do some other parts of these fragments) of Milton's Chaos and his Creation. ἐπεὶ Νεῖκος μὲν ἐνέρτατον ἵκετο βένθος δίνης, ἐν δὲ μέσῃ Φιλότης στροφάλιγγι γένηται, ἡ πίφρων Φιλότητος ἀμεμφέος ἄμβροτος ὁρμή. |