Chapter III · (continued 2)

Their character, by Heeren. 77. The Miscellanies, Heeren says, were then considered an immortal work; it was deemed an honour to be mentioned in them, and those who missed this made it a matter of complaint. If we look at them now, we are astonished at the different measure of glory in the present age. This book probably sprung out of Politian’s lectures. He had cleared up in these some difficult passages, which had led him on to further inquiries. Some of his explanations might probably have arisen out of the walks and rides he was accustomed to take with Lorenzo, who had advised the publication of the Miscellanies. The manner in which these explanations are given, the light, yet solid mode of handling the subjects, and their great variety, give in fact a charm to the Miscellanies of Politian which few antiquarian works possess. Their success is not wonderful. They were fragments, and chosen fragments, from the lectures of the most celebrated teacher of that age, whom many had heard, but still more had wished to hear. Scarcely had a work appeared in the whole fifteenth century, of which so vast expectations had been entertained, and which was received with such curiosity.[407] The very fault of Politian’s style, as it was that of Hermolaus Barbarus, his affected intermixture of obsolete words, for which it is necessary in almost every page of his Miscellanies to consult the dictionary, would, in an age of pedantry, increase the admiration of his readers.[408]

His version of Herodian. 78. Politian was the first that wrote the Latin language with much elegance; and while every other early translator from the Greek has incurred more or less of censure at the hands of judges whom better learning had made fastidious, it is agreed by them that his Herodian has all the spirit of his original, and frequently excels it.[409] Thus we perceive that the age of Poggio, Filelfo, and Valla was already left far behind by a new generation: these had been well employed as the pioneers of ancient literature; but for real erudition and taste we must descend to Politian, Christopher Landino, and Hermolaus Barbarus.[410]

Cornucopia of Perotti. 79. The Cornucopia sive Linguæ Latinæ Commentarii, by Nicolas Perotti, bishop of Siponto, suggests rather more by its title than the work itself seems to warrant. It is a copious commentary upon part of Martial; in which he takes occasion to explain a vast many Latin words, and has been highly extolled by Morhof, and by writers quoted in Baillet and Blount. To this commentary is appended an alphabetical index of words, which rendered it a sort of dictionary for the learned reader. Perotti lived a little before this time; but the first edition seems to have been in 1489. He also wrote a small Latin grammar, frequently reprinted in the fifteenth century, and was an indifferent translator of Polybius.[411]

Latin poetry of Politian. 80. We have not thought it worth while to mention the Latin poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They are numerous, and somewhat rude, from Petrarch and Boccace to Maphæus Vegius, the continuator of the Æneid in a thirteenth book, first printed in 1471, and very frequently afterwards. This is, probably, the best versification before Politian. But his Latin poems display considerable powers of description, and a strong feeling of the beauties of Roman poetry. The style is imbued with these, not too ambitiously chosen, nor in the manner called Centonism, but so as to give a general elegance to the composition, and to call up pleasing associations in the reader of taste. This, indeed, is the common praise of good versifiers in modern Latin, and not peculiarly appropriate to Politian, who is inferior to some who followed, though to none, as I apprehend, that preceded in that numerous fraternity. His ear is good, and his rhythm, with a few exceptions, musical and Virgilian. Some defects are nevertheless worthy of notice. He is often too exuberant, and apt to accumulate details of description. His words, unauthorised by any legitimate example, are very numerous; a fault in some measure excusable by the want of tolerable dictionaries; so that the memory was the only test of classical precedent. Nor can we deny that Politian’s Latin poetry is sometimes blemished by affected and effeminate expressions, by a too studious use of repetitions, and by a love of diminutives, according to the fashion of his native language, carried beyond all bounds that correct Augustan latinity could possibly have endured. This last fault, and to a man of good taste it is an unpleasing one, belongs to a great part of the lyrical and even elegiac writers in modern Latin. The example of Catullus would probably have been urged in excuse; but perhaps Catullus went farther than the best judges approved; and nothing in his poems can justify the excessive abuse of that effeminate grace, what the stern Persius would have called, summa delumbe saliva, which pervades the poetry both of Italian and Cisalpine Latinists for a long period. On the whole, Politian, like many of his followers, is calculated to delight and mislead a schoolboy, but may be read with pleasure by a man.[412]

Italian poetry of Lorenzo. 81. Amidst all the ardour for the restoration of classical literature in Italy, there might seem reason to apprehend that native originality would not meet its due reward, and even that the discouraging notion of a degeneracy in the powers of the human mind might come to prevail. Those who annex an exaggerated value to correcting an unimportant passage in an ancient author, or, which is much the same, interpreting some worthless inscription, can hardly escape the imputation of pedantry; and doubtless this reproach might justly fall on many of the learned in that age, as, with less excuse, it has often done upon their successors. We have already seen that, for a hundred years, it was thought unworthy a man of letters, even though a poet, to write in Italian; and Politian, with his great patron Lorenzo, deserves no small honour for having disdained the false vanity of the philologers. Lorenzo stands at the head of the Italian poets of the fifteenth century in the sonnet as well as in the light lyrical composition. His predecessors, indeed, were not likely to remove the prejudice against vernacular poetry. Several of his sonnets appear, both for elevation and elegance of style, worthy of comparison with those of the next age. But perhaps his most original claim to the title of a poet is founded upon the Canti Carnascialeschi, or carnival songs, composed for the popular shows on festivals. Some of these, which are collected in a volume printed in 1558, are by Lorenzo, and display a union of classical grace and imitation with the native raciness of Florentine gaiety.[413]

Pulci. 82. But at this time appeared a poet of a truly modern school, in one of Lorenzo’s intimate society, Luigi Pulci. The first edition of his Morgante Maggiore, containing twenty-three cantos, to which five were subsequently added, was published at Venice in 1481. The taste of the Italians has always been strongly inclined to extravagant combinations of fancy, caprices rapid and sportive as the animal from which they take their name. The susceptible and versatile imaginations of that people, and their habitual cheerfulness, enable them to render the serious and terrible instrumental to the ridiculous, without becoming, like some modern fictions, merely hideous and absurd.

Character of Morgante Maggiore. 83. The Morgante Maggiore was evidently suggested by some long romances written within the preceding century in the octave stanza, for which the fabulous chronicle of Turpin, and other fictions wherein the same real and imaginary personages had been introduced, furnished the materials. Under pretence of ridiculing the intermixture of sacred allusions with the romantic legends, Pulci carried it to an excess; which, combined with some sceptical insinuations of his own, seems clearly to display an intention of exposing religion to contempt.[414] As to the heroes of his romance, there can be, as it seems, no sort of doubt that he designed them for nothing else than the butts of his fancy; that the reader might scoff at those whom duller poets had held up to admiration. It has been a question among Italian critics, whether the poem of Pulci is to be reckoned burlesque.[415] This may seem to turn on the definition, though I do not see what definition could be given, consistently with the use of language, that would exclude it; it is intended as a caricature of the poetical romances, and might even seem by anticipation a satirical, though not ill-natured, parody on the Orlando Furioso. That he meant to excite any other emotion than laughter cannot, as it seems, be maintained; and a very few stanzas of a more serious character, which may rarely be found, are not enough to make an exception to his general design. The Morgante was to the poetical romances of chivalry, what Don Quixote was to their brethren in prose.

There is something harsh in Pulci’s manner, owing to his abrupt transition from one idea to another, and to his carelessness of grammatical rules. He was a poet by nature, and wrote with ease, but he never cared for sacrificing syntax to meaning; he did not mind saying anything incorrectly, if he were but sure that his meaning would be guessed. The rhyme very often compels him to employ expressions, words, and even lines which frequently render the sense obscure and the passage crooked, without producing any other effect than that of destroying a fine stanza. He has no similes of any particular merit, nor does he stand eminent in description. His verses almost invariably make sense taken singly, and convey distinct and separate ideas. Hence he wants that richness, fulness, and smooth flow of diction, which is indispensable to an epic poet, and to a noble description or comparison. Occasionally, when the subject admits of a powerful sketch which may be presented with vigour and spirit by a few strokes boldly drawn, Pulci appears to a great advantage.—Panizzi on romantic poetry of Italians, in the first volume of his Orlando Innamorato, p. 298.

84. A foreigner must admire the vivacity of the narrative, the humorous gaiety of the characters, the adroitness of the satire. But the Italians, and especially the Tuscans, delight in the raciness of Pulci’s Florentine idiom, which we cannot equally relish. He has not been without influence on men of more celebrity than himself. In several passages of Ariosto, especially the visit of Astolfo to the moon, we trace a resemblance not wholly fortuitous. Voltaire, in one of his most popular poems, took the dry archness of Pulci, and exaggerated the profaneness, superadding the obscenity from his own stores. But Mr. Frere, with none of these two ingredients in his admirable vein of humour, has come, in the War of the Giants, much closer to the Morgante Maggiore than any one else.

Platonic theology of Ficinus. 85. The Platonic academy, in which the chief of the Medici took so much delight, did not fail to reward his care. Marsilius Ficinus, in his Theologica Platonica (1482), developed a system chiefly borrowed from the later Platonists of the Alexandrian school, full of delight to the credulous imagination, though little appealing to the reason, which, as it seemed remarkably to coincide in some respects with the received tenets of the church, was connived at in a few reveries, which could not so well bear the test of an orthodox standard. He supported his philosophy by a translation of Plato into Latin, executed at the direction of Lorenzo, and printed before 1490. Of this translation Buhle has said, that it has been very unjustly reproached with want of correctness; it is, on the contrary, perfectly conformable to the original, and has even, in some passages, enabled us to restore the text; the manuscripts used by Ficinus, I presume, not being in our hands. It has also the rare merit of being at once literal, perspicuous, and in good Latin.[416]

Doctrine of Averroes on the soul. 86. But the Platonism of Ficinus was not wholly that of the master. It was based on the emanation of the human soul from God, and its capacity of reunion by an ascetic and contemplative life; a theory perpetually reproduced in various modifications of meaning, and far more of words. The nature and immortality of the soul, the functions and distinguishing characters of angels, the being and attributes of God, engaged the thoughtful mind of Ficinus. In the course of his high speculations he assailed a doctrine, which, though rejected by Scotus and most of the schoolmen, had gained much ground among the Aristotelians, as they deemed themselves, of Italy; a doctrine first held by Averroes; that there is one common intelligence, active, immortal, indivisible, unconnected with matter, the soul of human kind, which is not in any one man, because it has no material form, but which yet assists in the rational operations of each man’s personal soul, and from those operations which are all conversant with particulars, derives its own knowledge of universals. Thus, if I understand what is meant, which is rather subtle, it might be said, that as in the common theory particular sensations furnish means to the soul of forming general ideas, so, in that of Averroes, the ideas and judgments of separate human souls furnish collectively the means of that knowledge of universals, which the one great soul of mankind alone can embrace. This was a theory built, as some have said, on the bad Arabic version of Aristotle which Averroes used. But, whatever might have first suggested it to the philosopher of Cordova, it seems little else than an expansion of the Realist hypothesis, urged to a degree of apparent paradox. For if the human soul, as an universal, possess an objective reality, it must surely be intelligent; and, being such, it may seem no extravagant hypothesis, though one incapable of that demonstration we now require in philosophy, to suppose that it acts upon the subordinate intelligences of the same species, and receives impressions from them. By this also they would reconcile the knowledge we were supposed to possess of the reality of universals, with the acknowledged impossibility, at least in many cases, of representing them to the mind.

Opposed by Ficinus. 87. Ficinus is the more prompt to refute the Averroists, that they all maintained the mortality of the particular soul, while it was his endeavour, by every argument that erudition and ingenuity could supply, to prove the contrary. The whole of his Platonic Theology appears a beautiful, but too visionary and hypothetical, system of theism, the groundworks of which lay deep in the meditations of ancient oriental sages. His own treatise, of which a very copious account will be found in Buhle, soon fell into oblivion; but it belongs to a class of literature, which, in all its extension, has, full as much as any other, engaged the human mind.

Desire of man to explore mysteries. 88. The thirst for hidden knowledge, by which man is distinguished from brutes, and the superior races of men from savage tribes, burns generally with more intenseness in proportion as the subject is less definitely comprehensible, and the means of certainty less attainable. Even our own interest in things beyond the sensible world does not appear to be the primary or chief source of the desire we feel to be acquainted with them; it is the pleasure of belief itself, of associating the conviction of reality with ideas not presented by sense; it is sometimes the necessity of satisfying a restless spirit, that first excites our endeavour to withdraw the veil that conceals the mystery of their being. The few great truths in religion that reason discovers, or that an explicit revelation deigns to communicate, sufficient as they may be for our practical good, have proved to fall very short of the ambitious curiosity of man. They leave so much imperfectly known, so much wholly unexplored, that in all ages he has never been content without trying some method of filling up the void. These methods have often led him to folly, and weakness, and crime. Yet as those who want the human passions, in their excess the great fountains of evil, seem to us maimed in their nature, so an indifference to this knowledge of invisible things, or a premature despair of attaining it, may be accounted an indication of some moral or intellectual deficiency, some scantness of due proportion in the mind.

Various methods employed. 89. The means to which recourse has been had to enlarge the boundaries of human knowledge in matters relating to the Deity, or to such of his intelligent creatures as do not present themselves in ordinary objectiveness to our senses, have been various, and may be distributed into several classes. |Reason and inspiration.| Reason itself, as the most valuable, though not the most frequent in use, may be reckoned the first. Whatever deductions have suggested themselves to the acute, or analogies to the observant mind, whatever has seemed the probable interpretation of revealed testimony, is the legitimate province of a sound and rational theology. But so fallible appears the reason of each man to others, and often so dubious are its inferences to himself, so limited is the span of our faculties, so incapable are they of giving more than a vague and conjectural probability, where we demand most of definiteness and certainty, that few, comparatively speaking, have been content to acquiesce even in their own hypothesis upon no other grounds than argument has supplied. The uneasiness that is apt to attend suspense of belief has required, in general, a more powerful remedy. Next to those who have solely employed their rational faculties in theology, we may place those who have relied on a supernatural illumination. These have nominally been many; but the imagination, like the reason, bends under the incomprehensibility of spiritual things; a few excepted, who have become founders of sects, and lawgivers to the rest, the mystics fell into a beaten track, and grew mechanical even in their enthusiasm.

Extended inferences from sacred books. 90. No solitary and unconnected meditations, however, either of the philosopher or the mystic, could furnish a sufficiently extensive stock of theological faith for the multitude, who, by their temper and capacities, were more prone to take it at the hands of others than choose any tenets for themselves. They looked, therefore, for some authority upon which to repose; and instead of builders, became as it were occupants of mansions prepared for them by more active minds. Among those who acknowledged a code of revealed truths, the Jews, Christians, and Mahometans, this authority has been sought in largely expansive interpretations of their sacred books; either of positive obligation, as the decisions of general councils were held to be, or at least of such weight as a private man’s reason, unless he were of great name himself, was not permitted to contravene. These expositions, in the Christian Church, as well as among the Jews, were frequently allegorical; a hidden stream of esoteric truth was supposed to flow beneath all the surface of Scripture; and every text germinated, in the hands of the preacher, into meanings far from obvious, but which were presumed to be not undesigned. This scheme of allegorical interpretation began among the earliest fathers, and spread with perpetual expansion through the middle ages.[417] The Reformation swept most of it away; but it has frequently revived in a more partial manner. We mention it here only as one great means of enabling men to believe more than they had done, of communicating to them what was to be received as divine truths, not additional to Scripture, because they were concealed in it, but such as the church could only have learned through its teachers.

Confidence in traditions. 91. Another large class of religious opinions stood on a somewhat different footing. They were in a proper sense, according to the notions of those times, revealed from God; though not in the sacred writings which were the chief depositories of his word. Such were the received traditions in each of the three great religions, sometimes, absolutely infallible, sometimes, as in the former case of interpretations, resting upon such a basis of authority, that no one was held at liberty to withhold his assent. The Jewish traditions were of this kind; and the Mahometans have trod in the same path, we may add to these the legends of saints: none, perhaps, were positively enforced as of faith; but a Franciscan was not to doubt the inspiration and miraculous gifts of his founder. Nor was there any disposition in the people to doubt of them; they filled up with abundant measure the cravings of the heart and fancy, till, having absolutely palled both by excess, they brought about a kind of reaction, which has taken off much of their efficacy.

Confidence in individuals as inspired. 92. Francis of Assisi may naturally lead us to the last mode in which the spirit of theological belief manifested itself; the confidence in a particular man, as the organ of a special divine illumination. But though this was fully assented to by the order he instituted, and probably by most others, it cannot be said that Francis pretended to set up any new tenets, or enlarge, except by his visions and miracles, the limits of spiritual knowledge. Nor would this, in general, have been a safe proceeding in the middle ages. Those who made a claim to such light from heaven as could irradiate what the church had left dark seldom failed to provoke her jealousy. It is, therefore, in later times, and under more tolerant governments, that we shall find the fanatics, or impostors, whom the multitude has taken for witnesses of divine truth, or at least as interpreters of the mysteries of the invisible world.

Jewish Cabbala. 93. In the class of traditional theology, or what might be called complemental revelation, we must place the Jewish Cabbala. This consisted in a very specific and complex system, concerning the nature of the Supreme being, the emanation of various orders of spirits in successive links from his essence, their properties and characters. It is evidently one modification of the oriental philosophy, borrowing little from the Scriptures, at least through any natural interpretation of them, and the offspring of the Alexandrian Jews, not far from the beginning of the Christian æra. They referred it to a tradition from Esdras, or some other eminent person, on whom they fixed as the depositary of an esoteric theology communicated by divine authority. The Cabbala was received by the Jewish doctors in the first centuries after the fall of their state; and after a period of long duration, as remarkable for the neglect of learning in that people as in the Christian world, it revived again in that more genial season, the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the brilliancy of many kinds of literature among the Saracens of Spain excited their Jewish subjects to emulation. Many conspicuous men illustrate the Hebrew learning of those and the succeeding ages. It was not till now, about the middle of the fifteenth century, that they came into contact with the Christians in theological philosophy. The Platonism of Ficinus, derived, in great measure, from that of Plotinus and the Alexandrian school, was easily connected, by means especially of the writings of Philo, with the Jewish orientalism, sisters as they were of the same family. Several forgeries in celebrated names, easy to affect and sure to deceive, had been committed in the first ages of Christianity by the active propagators of this philosophy. Hermes Trismegistus, and Zoroaster, were counterfeited in books which most were prone to take for genuine, and which it was not then easy to refute on critical grounds. These altogether formed a huge mass of imposture, or, at best, of arbitrary hypothesis, which, for more than a hundred years after this time, obtained an undue credence, and consequently retarded the course of real philosophy in Europe.[418]

Picus of Mirandola. 94. They never gained over a more distinguished proselyte, or one whose credulity was more to be regretted, than a young man who appeared at Florence in 1485, John Picus of Mirandola. He was then twenty-two years old, the younger son of an illustrious family, which held that little principality as an imperial fief. At the age of fourteen he was sent to Bologna, that he might study the canon law, with a view to the ecclesiastical profession; but after two years he felt an inexhaustible desire for more elevated though less profitable sciences. He devoted the next six years to the philosophy of the schools, in the chief universities of Italy and France: whatever disputable subtilties the metaphysics and theology of that age could supply, became familiar to his mind; but to these he added a knowledge of the Hebrew and other eastern languages, a power of writing Latin with grace, and of amusing his leisure with the composition of Italian poetry. The natural genius of Picus is well shown, though in a partial manner, by a letter which will be found among those of Politian, in answer to Hermolaus Barbarus. His correspondent had spoken with the scorn, and almost bitterness, usual with philologers, of the Transalpine writers, meaning chiefly the schoolmen, for the badness of their Latin. The young scholastic answered, that he had been at first disheartened by the reflection that he had lost six years’ labour; but considered afterwards, that the barbarians might say something for themselves, and puts a very good defence in their mouths; a defence which wants nothing but the truth of what he is forced to assume, that they had been employing their intellects upon things instead of words. Hermolaus found, however, nothing better to reply than the compliment, that Picus would be disavowed by the schoolmen for defending them in so eloquent a style.[419]

His credulity in the Cabbala. 95. He learned Greek very rapidly, probably after his coming to Florence. And having been led, through Ficinus, to the study of Plato, he seems to have given up his Aristotelian philosophy for theories more congenial to his susceptible and credulous temper. These led him onwards to wilder fancies. Ardent in the desire of knowledge, incapable, in the infancy of criticism, to discern authentic from spurious writings, and perhaps disqualified, by his inconceivable rapidity in apprehending the opinions of others from judging acutely of their reasonableness, Picus of Mirandola fell an easy victim to his own enthusiasm and the snares of fraud. An impostor persuaded him to purchase fifty Hebrew manuscripts, as having been composed by Esdras, and containing the most secret mysteries of the Cabbala. From this time, says Corniani, he imbibed more and more such idle fables, and wasted in dreams a genius formed to reach the most elevated and remote truths. In these spurious books of Esdras, he was astonished to find, as he says, more of Christianity than Judaism, and trusted them the more confidently for the very reason that demonstrates their falsity.[420]

His literary performances. 96. Picus, about the end of 1486, repaired to Rome, and with permission of Innocent VIII., propounded his famous nine hundred theses, or questions, logical, ethical, mathematical, physical, metaphysical, theological, magical, and cabbalistical; upon every one of which he offered to dispute with any opponent. Four hundred of these propositions were from philosophers of Greece or Arabia, from the schoolmen, or from the Jewish doctors; the rest were announced as his own opinions, which, saving the authority of the church, he was willing to defend.[421] There was some need of this reservation; for several of his theses were ill-sounding, as it was called, in the ears of the orthodox. They raised a good deal of clamour against him; and the high rank, brilliant reputation, and obedient demeanour of Picus were all required to save him from public censure or more serious animadversions. He was compelled, however, to swear that he would adopt such an exposition of his theses as the pope should set forth. But as this was not done, he published an apology, especially vindicating his employment of cabbalistical and magical learning. This excited fresh attacks, which in some measure continued to harass him, till, on the accession of Alexander VI. to the papal chair, he was finally pronounced free from blameable intention. He had meantime, as we may infer from his later writings, receded from some of the bolder opinions of his youth. His mind became more devout, and more fearful of deviating from the church. On his first appearance at Florence, uniting rare beauty with high birth and unequalled renown, he had been much sought by women, and returned their love. But at the age of twenty-five he withdrew himself from all worldly distraction, destroying, as it is said, his own amatory poems, to the regret of his friends.[422] He now published several works, of which the Heptaplus is a cabbalistic exposition of the first chapter of Genesis. It is remarkable that, with his excessive tendency to belief, he rejected altogether, and confuted in a distinct treatise, the popular science of astrology, in which men so much more conspicuous in philosophy have trusted. But he had projected many other undertakings of vast extent; an allegorical exposition of the New Testament, a defence of the Vulgate and Septuagint against the Jews, a vindication of Christianity against every species of infidelity and heresy; and finally, a harmony of philosophy, reconciling the apparent inconsistencies of all writers, ancient and modern, who deserved the name of wise, as he had already attempted by Plato and Aristotle. In these arduous labours he was cut off by a fever at the age of thirty-one, in 1494, on the very day that Charles VIII. made his entry into Florence. A man, so justly called the phœnix of his age, and so extraordinarily gifted by nature, ought not to be slightly passed over, though he may have left nothing which we could read with advantage. If we talk of the admirable Crichton, who is little better than a shadow, and lives but in panegyric, so much superior and more wonderful a person as John Picus of Mirandola should not be forgotten.[423]

State of learning in Germany.

Agricola. 97. If, leaving the genial city of Florence, we are to judge of the state of knowledge in our Cisalpine regions, and look at the books it was thought worth while to publish, which seems no bad criterion, we shall rate but lowly their proficiency in the classical literature so much valued in Italy. Four editions, and those chiefly of short works, were printed at Deventer, one at Cologne, one at Louvain, five perhaps at Paris, two at Lyons.[424] But a few undated books might, probably, be added. Either, therefore, the love of ancient learning had grown colder, which was certainly not the case, or it had never been strong enough to reward the labour of the too sanguine printers. Yet it was now striking root in Germany. The excellent schools of Munster and Schelstadt were established in some part of this decade; they trained those who were themselves to become instructors; and the liberal zeal of Langius extending beyond his immediate disciples, scarce any Latin author was published in Germany in which he did not correct the text.[425] The opportunities he had of doing so were not, as has been just seen, so numerous in this period as they became in the next. He had to withstand a potent and obstinate faction. The mendicant friars of Cologne, the head-quarters of barbarous superstition, clamoured against his rejection of the old school-books, and the entire reform of education. But Agricola addresses his friend in sanguine language: I entertain the greatest hope from your exertions, that we shall one day wrest from this insolent Italy her vaunted glory of pre-eminent eloquence; and redeeming ourselves from the opprobrium of ignorance, barbarism, and incapacity of expression which she is ever casting upon us, may show our Germany so deeply learned, that Latium itself shall not be more Latin than she will appear.[426] About 1482, Agricola was invited to the court of the elector palatine at Heidelberg. He seems not to have been engaged in public instruction, but passed the remainder of his life, unfortunately too short, for he died in 1485, in diffusing and promoting a taste for literature among his contemporaries. No German wrote in so pure a style, or possessed so large a portion of classical learning. Vives places him in dignity and grace of language even above Politian and Hermolaus.[427] The praises of Erasmus, as well as of the later critics, if not so marked, are very freely bestowed. His letters are frequently written in Greek; a fashion of those who could; and as far as I have attended to them, seem equal in correctness to some from men of higher name in the next age.

Agnosco virum divini pectoris, eruditionis reconditæ, stylo minime vulgari, solidum, nervosum elaboratum, compositum. In Italia summus esse poterat, nisi Germanium prætulisset. Erasmus in Ciceroniano. He speaks as strongly in many other places. Testimonies to the merits of Agricola from Huet, Vossius, and others, are collected by Bayle, Blount, Baillet, and Niceron. Meiners has written his life, ii. pp. 332-363; and several of his letters will be found among those addressed to Reuchlin, Epistolæ ad Reuchlinum; a collection of great importance for this portion of literary history.

Rhenish academy. 98. The immediate patron of Agricola, through whom he was invited to Heidelberg, was John Camerarius, of the house of Dalberg, bishop of Worms, and chancellor of the Palatinate. He contributed much himself to the cause of letters in Germany; especially if he is to be deemed the founder, as probably he should be, of an early academy, the Rhenish Society, which, we are told, devoted its time to Latin, Greek, and Hebrew criticism, astronomy, music, and poetry; not scorning to relax their minds with dances and feasts, nor forgetting the ancient German attachment to the flowing cup.[428] The chief seat of the Rhenish Society was at Heidelberg; but it had associate branches in other parts of Germany, and obtained imperial privileges. No member of this academy was more conspicuous than Conrad Celtes, who has sometimes been reckoned its founder, which, from his youth, is hardly probable, and was, at least, the chief instrument of its subsequent extension. He was indefatigable in the vineyard of literature, and, travelling to different parts of Germany, exerted a more general influence than Agricola himself. Celtes was the first from whom Saxony derived some taste for learning. His Latin poetry was far superior to any that had been produced in the empire; and for this, in 1487, he received the laurel crown from Frederic III.[429]

Reuchlin. 99. Reuchlin, in 1482, accompanied the duke of Wirtemberg on a visit to Rome. He thus became acquainted with the illustrious men of Italy, and convinced them of his own pretensions to the name of a scholar. The old Constantinopolitan Argyropulus, on hearing him translate a passage of Thucydides, exclaimed, Our banished Greece has now flown beyond the Alps. Yet Reuchlin, though from some other circumstances of his life a more celebrated, was not probably so learned or so accomplished a man as Agricola; he was withdrawn from public tuition by the favour of several princes, in whose courts he filled honourable offices; and after some years more, he fell unfortunately into the same seducing error as Picus of Mirandola, and sacrificed his classical pursuits for the Cabbalistic philosophy.

French language and poetry. 100. Though France contributed little to the philologer, several books were now published in French. In the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, 1486, a slight improvement in polish of language is said to be discernible.[430] The poems of Villon are rather of more importance. They were first published in 1489; but many of them had been written thirty years before. Boileau has given Villon credit for being the first who cleared his style from the rudeness and redundancy of the old romancers.[431] But this praise, as some have observed, is more justly due to the duke of Orleans, a man of full as much talent as Villon, with a finer taste. The poetry of the latter, as might be expected from a life of dissoluteness and roguery, is often low and coarse; but he seems by no means incapable of a moral strain, not destitute of terseness and spirit. Martial d’Auvergne, in his Vigiles de la Mort de Charles VII., which, from its subject, must have been written soon after 1460, though not printed till 1490, displays, to judge from the extracts in Goujet, some compass of imagination.[432] The French poetry of this age was still full of allegorical morality, and had lost a part of its original raciness. Those who desire an acquaintance with it may have recourse to the author just mentioned, or to Bouterwek; and extracts, though not so copious as the title promises, will be found in the Recueil des Anciens Poètes Français.

European drama. 101. The modern drama of Europe is derived, like its poetry, from two sources, the one ancient or classical, the other mediæval; the one an imitation of Plautus and Seneca, the other a gradual refinement of the rude scenic performances, denominated miracles, mysteries, or moralities. |Latin.| Latin plays upon the former model, a few of which are extant, were written in Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and sometimes represented, either in the universities, or before an audience of ecclesiastics and others who could understand them.[433] One of these, the Catinia of Secco Polentone, written about the middle of the fifteenth century, and translated by a son of the author into the Venetian dialect, was printed in 1482. This piece, however, was confined to the press.[434] Sabellicus, as quoted by Tiraboschi, has given to Pomponius Lætus the credit of having re-established the theatre at Rome, and caused the plays of Plautus Terence, as well as some more modern, which we may presume to have been in Latin, to be performed before the pope, probably Sixtus IV. And James of Volterra, in a diary published by Muratori, expressly mentions a History of Constantine represented in the papal palace during the carnival of 1484.[435] In imitation of Italy, but, perhaps, a little after the present decennial period, Reuchlin brought Latin plays of his own composition before a German audience. They were represented by students of Heidelberg. An edition of his Progymnasmata Scenica, containing some of these comedies, was printed in 1498. It has been said that one of them is taken from the French farce Maître Patelin[436]; while another, entitled Sergius, according to Warton, flies a much higher pitch, and is a satire on bad kings and bad ministers; though, from the account of Meiners, it seems rather to fall on the fraudulent arts of the monks.[437] The book is very scarce, and I have never seen it. Conrad Celtes, not long after Reuchlin, produced his own tragedies and comedies in the public halls of German cities. It is to be remembered, that the oral Latin language might at that time be tolerably familiar to a considerable audience in Germany.

Orfeo of Politian. 102. The Orfeo of Politian has claimed precedence as the earliest represented drama, not of a religious nature, in a modern language. This was written by him in two days, and acted before the court of Mantua in 1483. Roscoe has called it the first example of the musical drama, or Italian opera; but though he speaks of this as agreed by general consent, it is certain that the Orfeo was not designed for musical accompaniment, except, probably, in the songs and choruses.[438] According to the analysis of the fable in Ginguéné, the Orfeo differs only from a legendary mystery by substituting one set of characters for another; and it is surely by an arbitrary definition that we pay it the compliment upon which the modern historians of literature seem to have agreed. Several absurdities which appear in the first edition are said not to exist in the original manuscripts from which the Orfeo has been reprinted.[439] We must give the next place to a translation of the Menæchmi of Plautus, acted at Ferrara in 1486, by order of Ercole I., and, as some have thought, his own production, or to some original plays said to have been performed at the same brilliant court in the following years.[440]

Origin of dramatic mysteries. 103. The less regular, though in their day not less interesting, class of scenical stories, commonly called mysteries, all of which related to religious subjects, were never in more reputation than at this time. It is impossible to fix their first appearance at any single æra, and the inquiry into the origin of dramatic representation must be very limited in its subject, or perfectly futile in its scope. All nations, probably, have at all times, to a certain extent, amused themselves both with pantomimic and oral representation of a feigned story; the sports of children are seldom without both; and the exclusive employment of the former, instead of being a first stage of the drama, as has sometimes been assumed, is rather a variety in the course of its progress.

Their early stage. 104. The Christian drama arose on the ruins of the heathen theatre: it was a natural substitute of real sympathies for those which were effaced and condemned. Hence we find Greek tragedies on sacred subjects almost as early as the establishment of the church, and we have testimonies to their representation at Constantinople. Nothing of this kind being proved with respect to the west of Europe in the dark ages, it has been conjectured, not improbably, though without necessity, that the pilgrims, of whom great numbers repaired to the East in the eleventh century, might have obtained notions of scenical dialogue, with a succession of characters, and with an ornamental apparatus, in which theatrical representation properly consists. The earliest mention of them, it has been said, is in England. Geoffrey, afterwards abbot of St. Albans, while teaching a school at Dunstable, caused one of the shows, vulgarly called miracles, on the story of St. Catherine, to be represented in that town. Such is the account of Matthew Paris, who mentions the circumstance incidentally, in consequence of a fire that ensued. This must have been within the first twenty years of the twelfth century.[441] It is not to be questioned, that Geoffrey, a native of France, had some earlier models in his own country. Le Bœuf gives an account of a mystery written in the middle of the preceding century, wherein Virgil is introduced among the prophets that come to adore the Saviour; doubtless in allusion to the fourth eclogue.

Extant English mysteries. 105. Fitz-Stephen, in the reign of Henry II., dwells on the sacred plays acted in London, representing the miracles or passions of martyrs. They became very common by the names of mysteries or miracles, both in England and on the Continent, and were not only exhibited within the walls of convents, but upon public occasions and festivals for the amusement of the people. It is probable, however, that the performers for a long time were always ecclesiastics. The earlier of those religious dramas were in Latin. A Latin farce exists on St. Nicholas, older than the thirteenth century.[442] It was slowly that the modern languages were employed; and perhaps it might hence be presumed, that the greater part of the story was told through pantomime. But as this was unsatisfactory, and the spectators could not always follow the fable, there was an obvious inducement to make use of the vernacular language. The most ancient specimens appear to be those which Le Grand d’Aussy found among the compositions of the Trouveurs. He has published extracts from three; two of which are in the nature of legendary mysteries, while the third, which is far more remarkable, and may possibly be of the following century, is a pleasing pastoral drama, of which there seem to be no other instances in the mediæval period.[443] Bouterwek mentions a fragment of a German mystery, near the end of the thirteenth century.[444] Next to this it seems that we should place an English mystery called The Harrowing of Hell. This, its editor observes, is believed to be the most ancient production in a dramatic form in our language. The manuscript from which it is now printed is on vellum, and is certainly as old as the reign of Edward III., if not older. It probably formed one of a series of performances of the same kind, founded upon Scripture history. It consists of a prologue, epilogue, and intermediate dialogue of nine persons, Dominus, Sathan, Adam, Eve, &c. Independently of the alleged age of the manuscript itself, the language will hardly be thought later than 1350.[445] This, however, seems to stand at no small distance from any extant work of the kind. Warton having referred the Chester mysteries to 1327, when he supposes them to have been written by Ranulph Higden, a learned monk of that city, best known as the author of the Polychronicon, Roscoe positively contradicts him, and denies that any dramatic composition can be found in England anterior to the year 1500.[446] Two of these Chester mysteries have been since printed; but notwithstanding the very respectable authorities which assign them to the fourteenth century, I cannot but consider the language in which we now read them not earlier, to say the least, than the middle of the next. It is possible that they have in some degree been modernised. Mr. Collier has given an analysis of our own extant mysteries, or, as he prefers to call them, Miracle-plays.[447] There does not seem to be much dramatic merit, even with copious indulgence, in any of them; and some, such as the two Chester mysteries, are in the lowest style of buffoonery; yet they are of some importance in the absolute sterility of English literature during the age in which we presume them to have been written, the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV.

First French theatre. 106. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were fertile of these religious dramas in many parts of Europe. They were frequently represented in Germany, but more in Latin than in the mother-tongue. The French scriptural theatre, whatever may have been previously exhibited, seems not to be traced in permanent existence beyond the last years of the fourteenth century. It was about 1400, according to Beauchamps, or some years before, as the authorities quoted by Bouterwek imply, that the Confrairie de la Passion de N. S. was established as a regular body of actors at Paris.[448] They are said to have taken their name from the mystery of the passion, which in fact represented the whole life of our Lord from his baptism, and was divided into several days. In pomp of show they far excelled our English mysteries, in which few persons appeared, and the scenery was simple. But in the mystery of the passion, eighty-seven characters were introduced in the first day; heaven, earth, and hell combined to people the stage; several scenes were written for singing, and some for choruses. The dialogue, of which I have only seen similar to that of our own mysteries, though less rude, and with more efforts at a tragic tone.[449]

Theatrical machinery. 107. The mysteries, not confined to scriptural themes, embraced those which were hardly less sacred and trustworthy in the eyes of the people, the legends of saints. These afforded ample scope for the gratification which great part of mankind seem to take in witnessing the endurance of pain. Thus, in one of these Parisian mysteries, St. Barbara is hung up by the heels on the stage, and after uttering her remonstrances in that unpleasant situation, is torn with pincers and scorched with lamps before the audience. The decorations of this theatre must have appeared splendid. A large scaffolding at the back of the stage displayed heaven above and hell below, between which extended the world, with representations of the spot where the scene lay. Nor was the machinist’s art unknown. An immense dragon, with eyes of polished steel, sprung out from hell, in a mystery exhibited at Metz in the year 1437, and spread his wings so near to the spectators that they were all in consternation.[450] Many French mysteries, chiefly without date of the year, are in print, and probably belong, typographically speaking, to the present century.[451] One bears, according to Brunet, the date of 1484. These may, however, have been written long before their publication. Beauchamps has given a list of early mysteries and moralities in the French language, beginning near the end of the fourteenth century.

Italian religious dramas. 108. The religious drama was doubtless full as ancient in Italy as in any other country; it was very congenial to people whose delight in sensible objects is so intense. It did not supersede the extemporaneous performances, the mimi and histriones, who had probably never intermitted their sportive license since the days of their Oscan fathers, and of whom we find mention, sometimes with severity, sometimes with toleration, in ecclesiastical writers;[452] but it came into competition with them; and thus may be said to have commenced in the thirteenth century a war of regular comedy against the lawless savages of the stage, which has only been terminated in Italy within very recent recollection. We find a society del Gonfalone established at Rome in 1264, the statutes of which declare, that it is designed to represent the passion of Jesus Christ.[453] Lorenzo de’ Medici condescended to publish a drama of this kind on the martyrdom of two saints; and a considerable collection of similar productions during the fifteenth century was in the possession of Mr. Roscoe.[454]

Moralities. 109. Next to the mysteries came the kindred class, styled moralities. But as these belong more peculiarly to the next century, both in England and France, though they began about the present time, we may better reserve them for that period. |Farces.| There is still another species of dramatic composition, what may be called the farce, not always very distinguishable from comedy, but much shorter, admitting more buffoonery without reproach, and more destitute of any serious or practical end. It may be reckoned a middle link between the extemporaneous effusions of the mimes and the legitimate drama. The French have a diverting piece of this kind, Maitre Patelin, ascribed to Pierre Blanchet, and first printed in 1490. It was restored to the stage with much alteration, under the name of l’Avocat Patelin, about the beginning of the last century; and contains strokes of humour, which Molière would not have disdained.[455] Of these productions there were not a few in Germany, called Fastnachts-spiele, or Carnival plays, written in the license which that season has generally permitted. They are scarce and of little value. The most remarkable is the Apotheosis of Pope Joan, a tragi-comic legend, written about 1480.[456]

Mathematical works. 110. Euclid was printed for the first time at Venice in 1482; the diagrams in this edition are engraved on copper, and remarkably clear and neat.[457] The translation is that of Campanus from the Arabic. The cosmography of Ptolemy, which had been already twice published in Italy, appeared the same year at Ulm, with maps by Donis, some of them traced after the plans drawn by Agathodæmon, some modern; and it was reprinted, as well as Euclid, at the same place in 1486. The tables of Regiomontanus were printed both at Augsburg and Venice in 1490. We may take this occasion of introducing two names, which do not exclusively belong to the exact sciences, nor to the present period.

Leo Baptista Alberti. 111. Leo Baptista Alberti was a man, who, if measured by the universality of his genius, may claim a place in the temple of glory he has not filled; the author of a Latin comedy, entitled Philodoxios, which the younger Aldus Manutius afterwards published as the genuine work of a certain ancient Lepidus; a moral writer in the various forms of dialogue, dissertation, fable, and light humour; a poet, extolled by some, though not free from the rudeness of his age; a philosopher of the Platonic school of Lorenzo; a mathematician and inventor of optical instruments; a painter, and the author of the earliest modern treatise on painting; a sculptor, and the first who wrote about sculpture; a musician, whose compositions excited the applause of his contemporaries; an architect of profound skill, not only displayed in many works, of which the church of Saint Francis at Rimini is the most admired, but in a theoretical treatise, De Re Ædificatoriâ, published posthumously in 1485. It has been called the only work on architecture which we can place on a level with that of Vitruvius, and by some has been preferred to it. Alberti had deeply meditated the remains of Roman antiquity, and endeavoured to derive from them general theorems of beauty, variously applicable to each description of buildings.[458]

112. This great man seems to have had two impediments to his permanent glory: one, that he came a few years too soon into the world, before his own language was become polished, and before the principles of taste in art had been wholly developed; the other, that, splendid as was his own genius, there were yet two men a little behind, in the presence of whom his star has paled; men, not superior to Alberti in universality of mental powers, but in their transcendency and command over immortal fame. Many readers will have perceived to whom I allude,—Lionardo da Vinci, and Michael Angelo.

Lionardo da Vinci. 113. None of the writings of Lionardo were published till more than a century after his death; and, indeed, the most remarkable of them are still in manuscript. We cannot, therefore, give him a determinate place under this rather than any other decennium; but as he was born in 1452, we may presume his mind to have been in full expansion before 1490. His Treatise on Painting is known as a very early disquisition on the rules of the art. But his greatest literary distinction is derived from those short fragments of his unpublished writings that appeared not many years since; and which, according, at least, to our common estimate of the age in which he lived, are more like revelations of physical truths vouchsafed to a single mind, than the superstructure of its reasoning upon any established basis. The discoveries which made Galileo, and Kepler, and Mæstlin, and Maurolycus, and Castelli, and other names illustrious, the system of Copernicus, the very theories of recent geologers, are anticipated by Da Vinci, within the compass of a few pages, not perhaps in the most precise language, or on the most conclusive reasoning, but so as to strike us with something like the awe of præternatural knowledge. In an age of so much dogmatism, he first laid down the grand principle of Bacon, that experiment and observation must be the guides to just theory in the investigation of nature. If any doubt could be harboured, not as to the right of Lionardo da Vinci to stand as the first name of the fifteenth century, which is beyond all doubt, but as to his originality in so many discoveries, which, probably, no one man, especially in such circumstances, has ever made, it must be on an hypothesis, not very untenable, that some parts of physical science had already attained a height which mere books do not record. The extraordinary works of ecclesiastical architecture in the middle ages, especially in the fifteenth century, as well as those of Toscanelli and Fioravanti, which we have mentioned, lend some countenance to this opinion; and it is said to be confirmed by the notes of Fra Mauro, a lay brother of a convent near Venice, on a planisphere constructed by him, and still extant. Lionardo himself speaks of the earth’s annual motion, in a treatise that appears to have been written about 1510, as the opinion of many philosophers in his age.[459]

En mécanique Vinci connaissait, entr’autres choses: 1. La théorie des forces appliquées obliquement au bras du levier; 2. La résistance respective des poutres; 3. Les lois du frottement données ensuite par Amontons; 4. L’influence du centre de gravité sur les corps en repos ou en mouvement; 5. L’application du principe des vitesses virtuelles à plusieurs cas que la sublime analyse a porté de nos jours a sa plus grande généralité. Dans l’optique il décrivit la chambre obscure avant Porta, il expliqua avant Maurolycus la figure de l’image du soleil dans un trou de forme anguleuse; il nous apprend la perspective aerienne, la nature des ombres colorées, les mouvemens de l’iris, les effets de la durée de l’impression visible, et plusieurs autres phénomènes de l’œil qu’on ne rencontre point dans Vitellion. Enfin non seulement Vinci avait remarqué tout ce que Castelli a dit un siècle après lui sur le mouvement des eaux; le premier me parait même dans cette partie supérieur de beaucoup à l’autre, que l’Italie cependant a regardé comme le fondateur de l’hydraulique.

Il faut donc placer Léonard à la tête de ceux qui se sont occupés des sciences physico-mathématiques, et de la vraie méthode d’étudier parmi les modernes, p. 5.

The first extract Venturi gives is entitled, On the descent of heavy bodies combined with the rotation of the earth. He here assumes the latter, and conceives that a body falling to the earth from the top of a tower would have a compound motion in consequence of the terrestrial rotation. Venturi thinks that the writings of Nicolas de Cusa had set men on speculating concerning this before the time of Copernicus.

Vinci had very extraordinary lights as to mechanical motions. He says plainly, that the time of descent on inclined planes of equal height is as their length; that a body descends along the arc of a circle sooner than down the chord, and that a body descending an inclined plane will re-ascend with the same velocity as if it had fallen down the height. He frequently repeats, that every body weighs in the direction of its movement, and weighs the more in the ratio of its velocity; by weight evidently meaning what we call force. He applies this to the centrifugal force of bodies in rotation: Pendant tout ce temps elle pèse sur la direction de son mouvement.

Lorsqu’on employe une machine quelconque pour mouvoir un corps grave, toutes les parties de la machine qui ont un mouvement égal à celui du corps grave ont une charge égale au poids entier du même corps. Si la partie qui est le moteur a, dans le même temps, plus de mouvement que le corps mobile, elle aura plus de puissance que le mobile; et celà d’autant plus qu’elle se mouvra plus vite que le corps même. Si la partie qui est le moteur a moins de vitesse que le mobile, elle aura d’autant moins de puissance que ce mobile. If in this passage there is not the perfect luminousness of expression we should find in the best modern books, it seems to contain the philosophical theory of motion as unequivocally as any of them.

Vinci had a better notion of geology than most of his contemporaries, and saw that the sea had covered the mountains which contain shells: Ces coquillages ont vécu dans le même endroit lorsque l’eau de la mer le recouvrait. Les bancs, par la suite des temps, ont été recouverts par d’autres couches de limon de différentes hauteurs; ainsi, les coquilles ont été enclavées sous le bourbier amoncelé au dessus, jusqu’à sortir de l’eau. He seems even to have had an idea of the elevation of the continents, though he gives an unintelligible reason for it.

He explained the obscure light of the unilluminated part of the moon by the reflection of the earth, as Mœstlin did long after. He understood the camera obscura, and describes its effect. He perceived that respirable air must support flame: Lorsque l’air n’est pas dans un état propre à recevoir la flamme, il n’y peut vivre ni flamme ni aucun animal terrestre ou aerien. Aucun animal ne peut vivre dans un endroit ou la flamme ne vit pas.

Vinci’s observations on the conduct of the understanding are also very much beyond his time. I extract a few of them.

Il est toujours bon pour l’entendement d’acquérir des connaissances quelles qu’elles soient; on pourra ensuite choisir les bonnes et écarter les inutiles.

L’interprète des artifices de la nature, c’est l’expérience. Elle ne se trompe jamais; c’est notre jugement qui quelquefois se trompe lui-même, parcequ’il s’attend à des effets auxquels l’expérience se refuse. Il faut consulter l’expérience, en varier les circonstances jusqu’à ce que nous en ayons tiré des règles générales; car c'est elle qui fournit les vraies règles. Mais à quoi bon ces règles, me direz-vous? Je réponds qu’elles nous dirigent dans les recherches de la nature et les opérations de l’art. Elles empêchent que nous ne nous abusions nous-mêmes ou les autres, en nous promettant des résultats que nous ne saurions obtenir.

Il n’y a point de certitude dans les sciences où on ne peut pas appliquer quelque partie des mathématiques, ou qui n’en dépendent pas de quelque manière.

Dans l’étude des sciences qui tiennent aux mathématiques, ceux qui ne consultent pas la nature, mais les auteurs, ne sont pas les enfans de la nature; je dirais qu’ils n’en sont que les petits fils: elle seule, en effet, est le maitre des vrais génies. Mais voyez la sottise! on se moque d’un homme qui aimera mieux apprendre de la nature elle-même, que des auteurs, qui n’en sont que les clercs. Is not this the precise tone of Lord Bacon?

Vinci says, in another place: Mon dessein est de citer d’abord l’expérience, et de démontrer ensuite pourquoi les corps sont contraints d’agir de telle manière. C’est la méthode qu’on doit observer dans les recherches des phénomènes de la nature. Il est bien vrai que la nature commence par le raisonnement, et finit par l’expérience; mais n’importe, il nous faut prendre la route opposée: comme j’ai dit, nous devons commencer par l’expérience, et tâcher par son moyen d’en découvrir la raison.

He ascribes the elevation of the equatorial waters above the polar to the heat of the sun: Elles entrent en mouvement de tous les côtés de cette éminence aqueuse pour rétablir leur sphéricité parfaite. This is not the true cause of their elevation, but by what means could he know the fact?

Vinci understood fortification well, and wrote upon it. Since in our time, he says, artillery has four times the power it used to have, it is necessary that the fortification of towns should be strengthened in the same proportion. He was employed on several great works of engineering. So wonderful was the variety of power in this miracle of nature. For we have not mentioned that his Last Supper at Milan is the earliest of the great pictures in Italy, and that some productions of his easel vie with those of Raphael. His only published work, the Treatise on Painting, does him injustice; it is an ill-arranged compilation from several of his manuscripts. That the extraordinary works, of which this note contains an account, have not been published entire, and in their original language, is much to be regretted by all who know how to venerate so great a genius as Lionardo da Vinci.

Sect. VI. 1491-1500.

State of Learning in Italy—Latin and Italian Poets—Learning in France and England—Erasmus—Popular Literature and Poetry—Other kinds of Literature—General Literary Character of Fifteenth Century—Book-trade, its Privileges and Restraints.

Aldine Greek editions. 114. The year 1494 is distinguished by an edition of Musæus, generally thought the first work from the press established at Venice by Aldus Manutius, who had settled there in 1489.[460]

In the course of about twenty years, with some interruption, he gave to the world several of the principal Greek authors; and though, as we have seen, not absolutely the earliest printer in that language, he so far excelled all others in the number of his editions, that he may be justly said to stand at the head of the list. It is right, however, to mention, that Zarot had printed Hesiod and Theocritus in one volume, and also Isocrates, at Milan, in 1493; that the Anthologia appeared at Florence in 1494; Lucian and Apollonius Rhodius in 1496; the lexicon of Suidas, at Milan, in 1499. About fifteen editions of Greek works, without reckoning Craston’s lexicon and several grammars, had been published before the close of the century.[461] The most remarkable of the Aldine editions are the Aristotle, in five volumes, the first bearing date of 1495, the last of 1498, and nine plays of Aristophanes in the latter year. In this Aristophanes, and perhaps in other editions of this time, Aldus had fortunately the assistance of Marcus Musurus, one of the last, but by no means the least eminent, of the Greeks who transported their language to Italy. Musurus was now a public teacher at Padua. John Lascaris, son, perhaps, of Constantine, edited the Anthologia at Florence. It may be doubted whether Italy had as yet produced any scholar, unless it were Varino, more often called Phavorinus, singly equal to the task of superintending a Greek edition. His Thesaurus Cornucopiæ, a collection of thirty-four grammatical tracts in Greek, printed 1496, may be an exception. The Etymologicum Magnum, Venice, 1499, being a lexicon with only Greek explanations, is supposed to be chiefly due to Musurus. Aldus had printed Craston’s lexicon, in 1497, with the addition of an index; this has often been mistaken for an original work.[462]

Decline of learning in Italy. 115. The state of Italy was not so favourable as it had been to the advancement of philosophy. After the expulsion of the Medici from Florence, in 1494, the Platonic academy was broken up; and that philosophy never found again a friendly soil in Italy, though Ficinus had endeavoured to keep it up by a Latin translation of Plotinus. Aristotle and his followers began now to regain the ascendant. Perhaps it may be thought that even polite letters were not so flourishing as they had been; no one, at least, yet appeared to fill the place of Hermolaus Barbarus, who died in 1493, or Politian, who followed him the next year.

Hermolaus Barbarus. 116. Hermolaus Barbarus was a noble Venetian, whom Europe agreed to place next to Politian in critical learning, and to draw a line between them and any third name. No time, no accident, no destiny, says an enthusiastic scholar of the next age, will ever efface their remembrance from the hearts of the learned.[463] Erasmus calls him a truly great and divine man. He filled many honourable offices for the republic; but lamented that they drew him away from that learning for which he says he was born, and to which alone he was devoted.[464] Yet Hermolaus is but faintly kept in mind at the present day. In his Latin style, with the same fault as Politian, an affectation of obsolete words, he is less flexible and elegant. But his chief merit was in the restoration of the text of ancient writers. He boasts that he had corrected about five thousand passages in Pliny’s natural history, and more than three hundred in the very brief geography of Pomponius Mela. Hardouin, however, charges him with extreme rashness in altering passages he did not understand. The pope had nominated Hermolaus to the greatest post in the Venetian church, the patriarchate of Aquileia; but his mortification at finding that the senate refused to concur in the appointment is said to have hastened his death.[465]

Mantuan. 117. A Latin poet once of great celebrity, Baptista Mantuan, seems to fall within this period as fitly as any other, though several of his poems had been separately printed before, and their collective publication was not till 1513. Editions recur very frequently in the bibliography of Italy and Germany. He was, and long continued to be, the poet of school-rooms. Erasmus says that he would be placed by posterity not much below Virgil;[466] and the marquis of Mantua, anticipating this suffrage, erected their statues side by side. Such is the security of contemporary compliments! Mantuan has long been utterly neglected, and does not find a place in most selections of Latin poetry. His Eclogues and Silvæ are said to be the least bad of his numerous works. He was among the many assailants of the church, or at least the court of Rome; and this animosity inspired him with some bitter, or rather vigorous, invectives. But he became afterwards a Carmelite friar.[467] Marullus, a Greek by birth, has obtained a certain reputation for his Latin poems, which are of no great value.

Pontanus. 118. A far superior name is that of Pontanus, to whom, if we attend to some critics, we must award the palm, above all Latin poets of the fifteenth century. If I might venture to set my own taste against theirs, I should not agree to his superiority over Politian. His hexameters are by no means deficient in harmony, and may, perhaps, be more correct than those of his rival, but appears to me less pleasing and poetical. His lyric poems are like too much modern Latin, in a tone of languid voluptuousness, and ring changes on the various beauties of his mistress, and the sweetness of her kisses. The few elegies of Pontanus, among which that addressed to his wife, on the prospect of peace, is the best known, fall very short of the admirable lines of Politian on the death of Ovid. Pontanus wrote some moral and political essays in prose, which are said to be full of just observations and sharp satire on the court of Rome, and written in a style which his contemporaries regarded with admiration. They were published in 1490. Erasmus, though a parsimonious distributor of praise to the Italians, has acknowledged their merit in the Ciceronianus.[468]

Neapolitan academy. 119. Pontanus presided at this time over the Neapolitan Academy, a dignity which he had attained upon the death of Beccatelli, in 1471. This was after the decline of the Roman and the Florentine, by far the most eminent reunion of literary men in Italy; and though it was long conspicuous, seems to have reached its highest point in the last years of this century, under the patronage of the mild Frederic of Aragon, and during that transient calm which Naples was permitted to enjoy between the invasions of Charles VIII. and Louis XII. That city and kingdom afforded many lovers of learning and poetry; some of them in the class of its nobles; each district being, as it were, represented in this academy by one or more of its distinguished residents. But other members were associated from different parts of Italy; and the whole constellation of names is still brilliant, though some have grown dim by time. The house of Este, at Ferrara, were still the liberal patrons of genius; none more eminently than their reigning marquis, Hercules I. And not less praise is due to the families who held the principalities of Urbino and Mantua.[469]

Boiardo. 120. A poem now appeared in Italy, well deserving of attention for its own sake, but still more so on account of the excitement and direction it gave to one of the most famous poets that ever lived. Matteo Maria Boiardo, count of Scandiano, a man esteemed and trusted at the court of Ferrara, amused his leisure in the publication of a romantic poem, for which the stories of Charlemagne and his paladins, related by one who assumed the name of Turpin, and already woven into long metrical narrations, current at the end of the fourteenth and during the fifteenth century in Italy, supplied materials, which are almost lost in the original inventions of the author. The first edition of this poem is without date, but probably in 1495. The author, who died the year before, left it unfinished at the ninth canto of the third book. Agostini, in 1516, published a continuation, indifferently executed, in three more books; but the real complement of the Innamorato is the Furioso.[470] The Orlando Innamorato of Boiardo has hitherto not received that share of renown which seems to be its due; overpowered by the splendour of Ariosto’s poem, and almost set aside in its original form by the improved edition or remaking (rifaccimento), which Berni afterwards gave, it has rarely been sought or quoted, even in Italy.[471]

The style is uncouth and hard; but without style, which is the source of perpetual delight, no long poem will be read; and it has been observed by Ginguéné with some justice, that Boiardo’s name is better remembered, though his original poem may have been more completely neglected, through the process to which Berni has subjected it. In point of novel invention and just keeping of character, especially the latter, he has not been surpassed by his illustrious follower Ariosto; and whatever of this we find in the Orlando Innamorato, is due to Boiardo alone; for Berni has preserved the sense of almost every stanza. The imposing appearance of Angelica at the court of Charlemagne, in the first canto, opens the poem with a splendour rarely equalled, with a luxuriant fertility of invention, and with admirable art; judiciously presenting the subject in so much singleness, that amidst all the intricacies and episodes of the story, the reader never forgets the incomparable princess of Albracca. The latter city, placed in that remote Cathay which Marco Polo had laid open to the range of fancy, and its siege by Agrican’s innumerable cavalry, are creations of Boiardo’s most inventive mind. Nothing in Ariosto is conceived so nobly, or so much in the true genius of romance. Castelvetro asserts that the names Gradasso, Mandricardo, Sobrino, and others which Boiardo has given to his imaginary characters, belonged to his own peasants of Scandiano; and some have improved upon this by assuring us, that those who take the pains to ascertain the fact may still find the representatives of these sonorous heroes at the plough, which, if the story were true, ought to be the case.[472] But we may give him credit for talent enough to invent those appellations; he hardly found an Albracca on his domains; and those who grudge him the rest acknowledge that, in a moment of inspiration, while hunting, the name of Rodomont occurred to his mind. We know how finely Milton, whose ear pursued, almost to excess, the pleasure of harmonious names, and who loved to expatiate in these imaginary regions, has alluded to Boiardo’s poem in the Paradise Regained. The lines are perhaps the most musical he has ever produced.

Francesco Bello. 121. The Mambriano of Francesco Bello, sirnamed il Cieco, another poem of the same romantic class, was published posthumously in 1497. Apostolo Zeno, as quoted by Roscoe, attributes the neglect of the Mambriano to its wanting an Ariosto to continue its subject, or a Berni to reform its style.[474] But this seems a capricious opinion. Bello composed it at intervals to amuse the courtiers of the marquis of Mantua. The poem, therefore, wants unity. It is a reunion, says Mr. Panizzi, of detached tales, without any relation to each other, except in so far as most of the same actors are before us.[475] We may perceive by this, how little a series of rhapsodies, not directed by a controlling unity of purpose, even though the work of a single man, are likely to fall into a connected poem. But that a long poem, of singular coherence and subordination of parts to an end, should be framed from the random and insulated songs of a great number of persons, is almost as incredible as that the annals of Ennius, to use Cicero’s argument against the fortuitous origin of the world, should be formed by shaking together the letters of the alphabet.

Italian poetry near the end of the century. 122. Near the close of the fifteenth century we find a great increase of Italian poetry, to which the patronage and example of Lorenzo had given encouragement. It is not easy to place within such narrow limits as a decennial period, the names of writers whose productions were frequently not published, at least collectively, during their lives. Serafino d’Aquila, born in 1466, seems to fall, as a poet, within this decade; and the same may be said of Tibaldeo and Benivieni. Of these the first is perhaps the best known; his verses are not destitute of spirit, but extravagance and bad taste deform the greater part.[476] Tibaldeo unites false thoughts with rudeness and poverty of diction. Benivieni, superior to either of these, is reckoned by Corniani a link between the harshness of the fifteenth and the polish of the ensuing century. The style of this age was far from the grace and sweetness of Petrach; forced in sentiment, low in choice of words, deficient in harmony, it has been condemned by the voice of all Italian critics.[477]

Progress of learning in France and Germany. 123. A greater activity than before was now perceptible in the literary spirit of France and Germany. It was also regularly progressive. The press of Paris gave twenty-six editions of ancient Latin authors, nine of which were in the year 1500. Twelve were published at Lyons. Deventer and Leipsic, especially the latter, which now took a lead in the German press, bore a part in this honourable labour; a proof of the rapid and extensive influence of Conrad Celtes on that part of Germany. It is to be understood that a very large proportion, or nearly the whole, of the Latin editions printed in Germany were for the use of schools.[478] We should be warranted in drawing an inference as to the progress in literary instruction in these countries from the increase in the number of publications, small as that number still is, and trifling as some of them may appear. It may be accounted for by the gradual working of the schools at Munster and other places, which had now sent out a race of pupils well fitted to impart knowledge in their turn to others; and by the patronage of some powerful men, among whom the first place, on all accounts, is due to the emperor Maximilian. Nothing was so likely to contribute to the intellectual improvement of Germany as the public peace of 1495, which put an end to the barbarous customs of the middle ages, not unaccompanied by generous virtues, but certainly as incompatible with the steady cultivation of literature as with riches and repose. Yet there seems to be no proof that the Greek language had obtained much more attention; no book connected with it is recorded to have been printed, and I do not find mention that it was taught, even superficially, in any university or school, at this time, though it might be conjectured without improbability. Reuchlin had now devoted his whole thoughts to cabbalistic philosophy, and the study of Hebrew; and Eichhorn, though not unwilling to make the most of early German learning, owns that, at the end of the century, no other person had become remarkable for a skill in Greek.[479]

Reuchlin had been very diligent in purchasing Greek manuscripts. But these were very scarce, even in Italy. A correspondent of his, Streler by name, one of the young men who went from Germany to Florence for education, tells him, in 1491, Nullos libros Græcis hic venales reperio; and again, de Græcis libris coemendis hoc scias; fui penes omnes hic librarios, nihil horum prorsus reperio. Epist. ad Reuchl. (1562) fol. 7. In fact, Reuchlin’s own library was so large as to astonish the Italian scholars when they saw the catalogue, who plainly owned they could not procure such books themselves. They had of course been originally purchased in Italy, unless we suppose some to have been brought by way of Hungary.

It is not to be imagined that the libraries of ordinary scholars were to be compared with that of Reuchlin, probably more opulent than most of them. The early printed books of Italy, even the most indispensable, were very scarce, at least in France. A Greek grammar was a rarity at Paris in 1499. Grammaticen Græcam, says Erasmus to a correspondent, summo studio vestigavi, ut emptam tibi mitterem, sed jam utraque divendita fuerat, et Constantini quæ dicitur, quæque Urbani. Epist. lix. See too Epist. lxxiii.

Erasmus.

His diligence. 124. Two men, however, were devoting incessant labour to the acquisition of that language at Paris, for whom was reserved the glory of raising the knowledge of it in Cisalpine Europe to a height which Italy could not attain. These were Erasmus and Budæus. The former, who had acquired as a boy the mere rudiments of Greek under Hegius at Deventer, set himself in good earnest to that study about 1499, hiring a teacher at Paris, old Hermonymus of Sparta, of whose extortion he complains; but he was little able to pay anything; and his noble endurance of privations for the sake of knowledge deserves the high reward of glory it received. I have given my whole soul, he says, to Greek learning, and as soon as I get any money I shall first buy Greek books, and then clothes.[480] If any new Greek book comes to hand, I would rather pledge my cloak than not obtain it; especially if it be religious, such as a psalter or a gospel.[481] It will be remembered that the books of which he speaks must have been frequently manuscripts.

Budæus; his early studies. 125. Budæus, in his proper name Budé, nearly of the same age as Erasmus, had relinquished every occupation for intense labour in literature. In an interesting letter, addressed to Cuthbert Tunstall in 1517, giving an account of his own early studies, he says that he learned Greek very ill from a bad master at Paris, in 1491. This was certainly Hermonymus, of whom Reuchlin speaks more favourably; but he was not quite so competent a judge.[482] Some years afterwards Budæus got much better instruction; ancient literature having derived within a few years great improvement in France by our intercourse with Italy, and by the importation of books in both the learned languages. Lascaris, who now lived at the court of Charles VIII., having returned with him from the Neapolitan expedition, gave Budæus some assistance, though not, according to the latter’s biographer, to any great extent.

Latin not well written in France. 126. France had as yet no writer of Latin, who could be endured in comparison with those of Italy. Robert Gaguin praises Fichet, rector of the Sorbonne, as learned and eloquent, and the first who had taught many to employ good language in Latin. The more certain glory of Fichet is to have introduced the art of printing into France. Gaguin himself enjoyed a certain reputation for his style, and his epistles have been printed. He possessed at least, what is most important, a love of knowledge, and an elevated way of thinking. But Erasmus says of him, that whatever he might have been in his own age, he would now scarcely be reckoned to write Latin at all. If we could rely on a panegyrist of Faustus Andrelinus, an Italian who came about 1489 to Paris, and was authorised, in conjunction with one Balbi, and with Cornelio Vitelli, to teach in the university,[483] he was the man who brought polite literature into France, and changed its barbarism for classical purity. But Andrelinus, who is best known as a Latin poet of by no means a high rank, seems not to merit his commendation. Whatever his capacities of teaching may have been, we have little evidence of his success. Yet the number of editions of Latin authors published in France during this decade proves some diffusion of classical learning; and we must admit the circumstance to be quite decisive of the inferiority of England.

Dawn of Greek learning in England. 127. A gleam of light, however, now broke out there. We have seen already that a few, even in the last years of Henry VI., had overcome all obstacles in order to drink at the fountain-head of pure learning in Italy. One or two more names might be added for the intervening period; Milling, abbot of Westminister, and Selling, prior of a convent at Canterbury.[484] It is reported by Polydore Virgil, and is proved by Wood, that Cornelio Vitelli, an Italian, came to Oxford about 1488, in order to give that most barbarous university some notion of what was going forward on the other side of the Alps; and it has been probably conjectured, or rather may be assumed, that he there imparted the rudiments of Greek to William Grocyn.[485] It is certain, at least, that Grocyn had acquired some insight into that language, before he took a better course, and, travelling into Italy, became the disciple of Chalcondyles and Politian. He returned home in 1491, and began to communicate his acquisitions, though chiefly to deaf ears, teaching in Exeter College at Oxford. A diligent emulator of Grocyn, but some years younger, and, like him, a pupil of Politian and Hermolaus, was Thomas Linacre, a physician; but though a first edition of his translation of Galen has been supposed to have been printed at Venice in 1498, it seems to be ascertained that none preceded that of Cambridge in 1521. His only contribution to literature in the fifteenth century was a translation of the very short mathematical treatise of Proclus on the sphere, published in a volume of ancient writers on astronomy, by Aldus Manutius, in 1499.[486]

Selling, however, did not go to Italy till after 1480, far from returning in 1460, as Warton has said, with his usual indifference to anachronisms.

Erasmus comes to England. 128. Erasmus paid his first visit to England in 1497, and was delighted with everything that he found, especially at Oxford. In an epistle dated Dec. 5th, after praising Grocyn, Colet, and Linacre to the skies, he says of Thomas More, who could not then have been eighteen years old, What mind was ever framed by nature more gentle, more pleasing, more gifted?—It is incredible, what a treasure of old books is found here far and wide.—There is so much erudition, not of a vulgar and ordinary kind, but recondite, accurate, ancient, both Latin and Greek, that you would seek nothing in Italy but the pleasure of travelling.[487] But this letter is addressed to an Englishman, and the praise is evidently much exaggerated; the scholars were few, and not more than three or four could be found, or at least could now be mentioned, who had any tincture of Greek,—Grocyn, Linacre, William Latimer, who, though an excellent scholar, never published anything, and More, who had learned at Oxford under Grocyn.[488] It should here be added, that, in 1497, Terence was printed by Pynson, being the first edition of a strictly classical author in England; though Boethius had already appeared with Latin and English on opposite pages.

It has been sometimes asserted, on the authority of Antony Wood, that Erasmus taught Greek at Oxford; but there is no foundation for this, and in fact he did not know enough of the language. Knight, on the other hand, maintains that he learned it there under Grocyn and Linacre; but this rests on no evidence; and we have seen that he gives a different account of his studies in Greek. Life of Erasmus, p. 22.

He publishes his Adages. 129. In 1500 was printed at Paris the first edition of Erasmus’s Adages, doubtless the chief prose work of this century beyond the limits of Italy; but this edition should, if possible, be procured, in order to judge with chronological exactness of the state of literature; for as his general knowledge of antiquity, and particularly of Greek, which was now very slender, increased, he made vast additions. The Adages, which were now about eight hundred, amounted in his last edition to 4151; not that he could find so many which properly deserve that name, but the number is made up by explanations of Latin and Greek idioms, or even of single words. He declares himself, as early as 1504, ashamed of the first edition of his Adages, which already seemed meagre and imperfect.[489] Erasmus had been preceded in some measure by Polydore Virgil, best known as the historian of this country, where he resided many years as collector of papal dues. He published a book of adages, which must have been rather a juvenile, and is a superficial production, at Venice in 1498.

Romantic ballads of Spain. 130. The Castilian poets of the fifteenth century have been collectively mentioned on a former occasion. Bouterwek refers to the latter part of this age most of the romances, which turn upon Saracen story, and the adventures of knights of Granada, gentlemen, though Moors. Sismondi follows him without, perhaps, much reflection, and endeavours to explain what he might have doubted. Fear having long ceased in the bosoms of the Castilian Christians, even before conquest had set its seal to their security, hate, the child of fear, had grown feebler; and the romancers felt themselves at liberty to expatiate in the rich field of Mohammedan customs and manners. These had already exercised a considerable influence over Spain. But this opinion seems hard to be supported; nor do I find that the Spanish critics claim so much antiquity for the Moorish class of romantic ballads. Most of them, it is acknowledged, belong to the sixteenth, and some to the seventeenth century; and the internal evidence is against their having been written before the Moorish wars had become matter of distant tradition. We shall therefore take no notice of the Spanish romance-ballads till we come to the age of Philip II., to which they principally belong.[490]

Pastoral romances. 131. Bouterwek places in this decade the first specimens of the pastoral romance which the Castilian language affords.[491] But the style is borrowed from a neighbouring part of the peninsula, where this species of fiction seems to have been indigenous. The Portuguese nation cultivated poetry as early as the Castilian; and we have seen that some remains of a date anterior to the fourteenth century. But to the heroic romance they seem to have paid no regard; we do not find that it ever existed among them. Love chiefly occupied the Lusitanian muse; and to trace that passion through all its labyrinths, to display its troubles in a strain of languid melancholy, was the great aim of every poet. This led to the invention of pastoral romances, founded on the ancient traditions as to the felicity of shepherds and their proneness to love, and rendered sometimes more interesting for the time by the introduction of real characters and events under a slight disguise.[492] This artificial and effeminate sort of composition, which, if it may now and then be not unpleasing, cannot fail to weary the modern reader by its monotony, is due to Portugal, and having been adopted in languages better known, became for a long time highly popular in Europe.

Portuguese lyric poetry. 132. The lyrical poems of Portugal were collected by Garcia de Resende, in the Cancioneiro Geral, published in 1516. Some few of these are of the fourteenth century, for we find the name of King Pedro, who died in 1369. Others are by the Infante Don Pedro, son of John I., in the earlier part of the fifteenth. But a greater number belong nearly to the present or preceding decade, or even to the ensuing age, commemorating the victories of the Portuguese in Asia. This collection is of extreme scarcity; none of the historians of Portuguese literature have seen it. Bouterwek and Sismondi declare that they have caused search to be made in various libraries of Europe without success. There is, however, a copy in the British Museum; and M. Raynouard has given a short account of one that he had seen in the Journal des Savans for 1826. In this article he observes, that the Cancioneiro is a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish pieces. I believe, however, that very little Spanish will be found, with the exception of the poems of the Infante Pedro, which occupy some leaves. The whole number of poets is but one hundred and thirty-two, even if some names do not occur twice; which I mention, because it has been erroneously said to exceed considerably that of the Spanish Cancioneiro. The volume is in folio, and contains two hundred and twenty-seven leaves. The metres are those usual in Spanish; some versos de arte mayor; but the greater part in trochaic redondillas. I observed no instance of the assonant rhyme; but there are several glosses, or, in the Portuguese word, grosas.[493] The chief part is amatory; but there are lines on the death of kings, and other political events.[494]

German popular books. 133. The Germans, if they did not as yet excel in the higher department of typography, were by no means negligent of their own great invention. The books, if we include the smallest, printed in the empire between 1470 and the close of the century, amount to several thousand editions. A large proportion of these were in their own language. They had a literary public, as we may call it, not merely in their courts and universities, but in their respectable middle class, the burghers of the free cities, and, perhaps, in the artizans whom they employed. Their reading was almost always with a serious end; but no people so successfully cultivated the art of moral and satirical fable. These, in many instances, spread with great favour through cisalpine Europe. Among the works of this kind, in the fifteenth century, two deserve mention; the Eulenspiegel, a book which became popular afterwards in England by the name of Howleglass, and a superior and better known production, the Narrenschiff, or Ship of Fools, by Sebastian Brandt of Strasburg, the first edition of which I do not find referred to any date; but the Latin translation appeared at Lyons in 1488. It was translated into English by Barclay, and published early in 1509. It is a metrical satire on the follies of every class, and may possibly have suggested to Erasmus his Encomium Moriæ. But the idea was not absolutely new; the theatrical company established at Paris, under the name of Enfans de San Souci, as well as the ancient office of jester or fool in our courts and castles, implied the same principle of satirising mankind with ridicule so general, that every man should feel more pleasure from the humiliation of his neighbours, than pain from his own. Brandt does not show much poetical talent; but his morality is clear and sound; he keeps the pure and right-minded reader on his side; and in an age when little better came into competition, his characters of men, though more didactic than descriptive, did not fail to please. The influence such books of simple fiction and plain moral would possess over a people, may be judged by the delight they once gave to children, before we had learned to vitiate the healthy appetite of ignorance by premature refinements and stimulating variety.[495]