V. HISTORY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE IN EUROPE FROM 1520 TO 1550…

V. HISTORY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE IN EUROPE FROM 1520 TO 1550

Classical Taste of the Italians--Ciceronians--Erasmus attacks them--Writings on Roman Antiquity--Learning in France--Commentaries of Budæus--Progress of Learning in Spain, Germany, England--State of Cambridge and Oxford--Advance of Learning still slow--Encyclopædic Works.

|Superiority of Italy in taste.|

1. Italy, the genial soil where the literature of antiquity had been first cultivated, still retained her superiority in the fine perception of its beauties, and in the power of retracing them by spirited imitation. It was the land of taste and sensibility; never surely more so than in the age of Raffaelle as well as Ariosto. Far from the clownish ignorance so long predominant in the transalpine aristocracy, the nobles of Italy, accustomed to a city life, and to social festivity, more than to war or the chase, were always conspicuous for their patronage, and, what is more important than mere patronage, their critical skill in matters of art and elegant learning. Among the ecclesiastical order this was naturally still more frequent. If the successors of Leo X. did not attain so splendid a name, they were perhaps, after the short reign of Adrian VI., which, if we may believe the Italian writers, seemed to threaten an absolute return of barbarism,[627] not less munificent or sedulous in encouraging polite and useful letters. The first part indeed of this period of thirty years was very adverse to the progress of learning; especially in that disastrous hour when the lawless mercenaries of Bourbon’s army were led on to the sack of Rome. In this, and in other calamities of the same kind, it happened that universities and literary academies were broken up, that libraries were destroyed or dispersed. That of Sadolet, having been with difficulty saved in the pillage of Rome, was dispersed, in consequence of shipwreck during its transport to France.[628] A better æra commenced with the pacification of Italy in 1531. The subsequent wars were either transient, or partial in their effects. The very extinction of all hope for civil freedom, which characterised the new period, turned the intellectual energies of an acute and ardent people towards those tranquil pursuits, which their rulers would both permit and encourage.

[627] Valerianus, in his treatise De Infelicitate Litteratorum, a melancholy series of unfortunate authors, in the manner, though not quite with the spirit and interest, of M. D’Israeli, speaks of Adrian VI. as of another Paul II. in hatred of literature. Ecce adest musarum et eloquentiæ, totiusque nitoris hostis acerrimus, qui literatis omnibus inimicitias minitatur, quoniam, ut ipse dictitabat, Terentiani essent, quos cum odisse atque etiam persequi cœpisset, voluntarium alii exilium, alias atque alias alii latebras quærentes, tamdiu latuere, quoad Dei beneficio, altero imperii anno decessit, qui si aliquanto diutius vixissit, Gotica illa tempora adversus bonas literas videbatur suscitaturus. Lib. ii. p. 34. It is but fair to add, that Erasmus ascribes to Adrian the protection of letters in the Low Countries. Vix nostra phalanx sustinuisset hostium conjurationem, ni Adrianus tum Cardinalis, postea Romanus pontifex, hoc edidisset oraculum: Bonus literas non damno, hæreses et schismata damno. Epist. Mclxxvi. There is not indeed much in this; but the Biographie Universelle (Suppl. art. Busleiden) informs us that this pope was compelled to interfere in order to remove the impediments to the foundation of Busleiden’s Collegium Trilingue at Louvain. It is well known that Adrian VI. was inclined to reform some abuses in the church; enough to set the Italians against him. See his life, in Bayle, Note D.

[628] Cum enim direptis rebus cæteris, libri soli superstites ab hostium injuria intacti, in navim conjecti, ad Galliæ littus jam pervecti essent, incidit in vectores, et in ipsos familiares meos pestilentia. Quo metu ii permoti, quorum ad littora navis appulsa fuerat, onera in terram exponi non permisere. Ita asportati sunt in alienas et ignotas terras; exceptisque voluminibus paucis, quæ deportavi mecum huc proficiscens, mei reliqui illi tot labores quos impenderamus, Græcis præsertim codicibus conquirendis undique et colligendis, mei tanti sumptus meæ curæ, omnes iterum jam ad nihilum reciderunt. Sadolet. Epist. lib. i. p. 23. (Colon. 1554.)

|Admiration of Antiquity.|

2. The real excellence of the ancients in literature as well as art gave rise to an enthusiastic and exclusive admiration of antiquity, not unusual indeed in other parts of Europe, but in Italy a sort of national pride which all partook. They went back to the memory of past ages for consolation in their declining fortunes, and conquered their barbarian masters of the north in imagination with Cæsar and Marius. Everything that reminded them of the slow decay of Rome, sometimes even their religion itself, sounded ill in their fastidious ears. Nothing was so much at heart with the Italian scholars, as to write a Latin style, not only free from barbarism, but conformable to the standard of what is sometimes called the Augustan age, that is of the period from Cicero to Augustus. Several of them affected to be exclusively Ciceronian.

|Sadolet.|

|Bembo.|

3. Sadolet, one of the apostolic secretaries under Leo X. and Clement VII., and raised afterwards to the purple by Paul III., stood in as high a rank as any for purity of language without affectation, though he seems to have been reckoned of the Ciceronian school. Except his epistles, however, none of Sadolet’s works are now read, or even appear to have been very conspicuous in his own age; though Corniani has given an analysis of a treatise on education.[629] A greater name, in point of general literary reputation, was Peter Bembo, a noble Venetian, secretary with Sadolet to Leo, and raised, like him, to the dignity of a cardinal by Paul III. Bembo was known in Latin and in Italian literature; and in each language both as a prose writer and a poet. We shall thus have to regard four claims he prefers to a niche in the temple of fame, and we shall find none of them ungrounded. In pure Latin style he was not perhaps superior to Sadolet, but would not have yielded to any competitor in Europe. It has been told, in proof of Bembo’s scrupulous care to give his compositions the utmost finish, that he kept forty portfolios, into which every sheet entered successively, and was only taken out to undergo his corrections, before it entered into the next limbo of this purgatory. Though this may not be quite true, it is but an exaggeration of the laborious diligence by which he must often have reduced his sense to feebleness and vacuity. He was one of those exclusive Ciceronians who, keenly feeling the beauties of their master’s eloquence, and aware of the corruption which after the age of Augustus came rapidly over the purity of style, rejected with scrupulous care not only every word or phrase which could not be justified by the practice of what was called the golden age, but even insisted on that of Cicero himself, as the only model they thought absolutely perfect. Paulus Manutius, one of the most rigorous, though of the most eminent among these, would not employ the words of Cicero’s correspondents, though as highly accomplished and polite as himself. This fastidiousness was of course highly inconvenient in a language constantly applicable to the daily occurrences of life in epistles or in narration, and it has driven Bembo, according to one of his severest critics, into strange affectation and circuity in his Venetian history. It produced also, what was very offensive to the more serious reader, and is otherwise frigid and tasteless, an adaptation of heathen phrases to the usages and even the characters of Christianity.[630] It has been remarked also, that in his great solicitude about the choice of words, he was indifferent enough to the value of his meaning; a very common failing of elegant scholars, when they write in a foreign language. But if some praise is due, as surely it is, to the art of reviving that consummate grace and richness which enchants every successive generation in the periods of Cicero, we must place Bembo, had we nothing more than this to say of him, among the ornaments of literature in the sixteenth century.

[629] Niceron says of Sadolet’s Epistles, which form a very thick volume: Il y a plusieurs choses dignes d’être remarquées dans les lettres de Sadolet; mais elles sont quelquefois trop diffuses, et par conséquent ennuyeuses à lire. I concur in this: yet it may be added, that the epistles of Cicero would sometimes be tedious, if we took as little interest in their subjects as we commonly do in those of Sadolet. His style is uniformly pure and good; but he is less fastidious than Bembo, and does not use circuity to avoid a theological expression. They are much more interesting, at least, than the ordinary Latin letters of his contemporaries, such as those of Paulus Manutius. A uniform goodness of heart, and love of right, prevail in the epistles of Sadolet. His desire of ecclesiastical reformation in respect of morals has caused him to be suspected of a bias towards protestantism, and a letter he wrote to Melanchthon, which that learned man did not answer, has been brought in corroboration of this; but the general tenor of his letters refutes this surmise. His theology, which was wholly semi-pelagian, must have led him to look with disgust on the Lutheran school (Epist. l. iii. p. 121, and l. ix. p. 410); and after Paul III. bestowed on him the purple, he became a staunch friend of the court of Rome, though never losing his wish to see a reform of its abuses. This will be admitted by every one who takes the trouble to run over Sadolet’s epistles.

[630] This affectation had begun in the preceding century, and was carried by Campano in his Life of Braccio di Montone to as great an extreme as by Bembo, or any Ciceronian of his age. Bayle (Bembus, Note B.) gives some odd instances of it in the latter. Notwithstanding his laborious scrupulosity as to language, Bembo is reproached by Lipsius, and others of a more advanced stage of critical knowledge, with many faults of Latin, especially in his letters. Ibid. Sturm says of the letters of Bembo: Ejus epistolæ scriptæ mihi magis quam missæ esse videntur. Indicia sunt hominis otiosi et imitatoris speciem magis rerum quam res ipsas consectantis. Ascham, Epist. cccxci.

|Ciceronianus of Erasmus.|

4. The tone which Bembo and others of that school were studiously giving to ancient literature, provoked one of the most celebrated works of Erasmus, the dialogues entitled Ciceronianus. The primary aim of these was to ridicule the fastidious purity of that sort of writers, who would not use a case or tense for which they could not find authority in the works of Cicero. A whole winter’s night, they thought, was well spent in composing a single sentence; but even then it was to be revised over and over again. Hence they wrote little except elaborated epistles. One of their rules, he tells us, was never to speak Latin, if they could help it, which must have seemed extraordinary in an age when it was the common language of scholars from different countries. It is certain, indeed, that the practice cannot be favourable to very pure Latinity.

5. Few books of that age give us more insight into its literary history and the public taste than the Ciceronianus. In a short retrospect Erasmus characterises all the considerable writers in Latin since the revival of letters, and endeavours to show how far they wanted this Ciceronian elegance for which some were contending. He distinguishes in a spirit of sound taste between a just imitation which leaves free scope for genius, and a servile following of a single writer. “Let your first and chief care,” he says, “be to understand thoroughly what you undertake to write about. That will give you copiousness of words, and supply you with true and natural sentiments. Then will it be found how your language lives and breathes, how it excites and hurries away the reader, and how it is a just image of your own mind. Nor will that be less genuine which you add to your own by imitation.”

6. The Ciceronianus, however, goes in some passages beyond the limited subject of Latin style. The controversy had some reference to the division between the men of learning and the men of taste, between the lovers of the solid and of the brilliant, in some measure also, to that between Christianity and Paganism, a garb which the incredulity of the Italians affected to put on. All the Ciceronian party, except Longolius, were on the other side of the Alps.[631] The object of the Italian scholars was to write pure Latin, to gleam little morsels of Roman literature, to talk a heathenish philosophy in private, and leave the world to its own abuses. That of Erasmus was to make men wiser and better by wit, sense, and learning.

[631] Though this is generally said, on the authority of Erasmus himself, Peter Bunel is asserted by some French scholars of great name, and particularly by Henry Stephens, to have equalled in Ciceronian purity the best of the Italians; and Paulus Manutius owns him as his master, in one of his epistles: Ego ab illo maximum habebam beneficium, quod me cum Politianis et Erasmis nescio quibus miserè errantem, in hanc rectè scribendi viam primus induxerat. In a later edition, for Politianis et Erasmis, it was thought more decent to introduce Philelphis et Campanis. Bayle, art. Bunel, Note A. The letters of Bunel, written with great purity, were published in 1551. It is to be observed, that he had lived much in Italy. Erasmus does not mention him in the Ciceronianus.

|Scaliger’s invective against it.|

7. Julius Cæsar Scaliger wrote against the Ciceronianus with all that unmannerly invective, which is the disgrace of many scholars, and very much his own. His vanity blinded him to what was then obvious to Europe, that with considerable learning, and still better parts, he was totally unworthy of being named with the first man in the literary republic. Nor in fact had he much right to take up the cause of the Ciceronian purists, with whom he had no pretension to be reckoned, though his reply to Erasmus is not ill written. It consists chiefly in a vindication of Cicero’s life and writings against some passages in the Ciceronianus which seem to affect them, scarcely touching the question of Latin style. Erasmus made no answer, and thus escaped the danger of retaliating on Scaliger in his own phrases.

|Editions of Cicero.|

8. The devotedness of the Italians to Cicero was displayed in a more useful manner than by this close imitation. Pietro Vettori (better known as Victorius), professor of Greek and Roman literature at Florence, published an entire edition of the great orator’s writings in 1534. But this was soon surpassed by a still more illustrious scholar, Paulus Manutius, son of Aldus, and his successor in the printing-house at Venice. His edition of Cicero appeared in 1540. It is by far the most important edition of any ancient author that had hitherto been published. In fact, the notes of Manutius, which were very much augmented in later editions,[632] form at this day in great measure the basis of interpretation and illustration of Cicero, as what are called the Variorum editions will show. A further accession to Ciceronian literature was made by Nizolius in his Observationes in M. Tullium Ciceronem, 1535. This hardly indicates that it is a dictionary of Ciceronian words, with examples of their proper senses. The later and improved editions bear the title of Thesaurus Ciceronianus. I find no critical work in this period of greater extent and labour than that of Scaliger de Causis Latinæ Linguæ; by “causis” meaning its principles. It relates much to the foundations of the language, or the rules by which its various peculiarities have been formed. He corrects many alleged errors of earlier writers, and sometimes of Valla himself; enumerating, rather invidiously, 634 of such errors in an index. In this book he shows much acuteness and judgment.

[632] Renouard, Imprimerie des Aldes.

|Alexander ab Alexandro.|

9. The Geniales Dies of Alexander ab Alexandro, a Neapolitan lawyer, published in 1522, are on the model of Aulus Gellius, a repertory of miscellaneous learning, thrown together without arrangement, on every subject of Roman philology and antiquities. The author had lived with the scholars of the fifteenth century, and even remembered Philelphus; but his own reputation seems not to have been extensive, at least through Europe. “He knows every one,” says Erasmus in a letter; “no one knows who he is.”[633] The Geniales Dies has had better success in later ages than most early works of criticism, a good edition having appeared, with Variorum notes, in 1673. It gives, like the Lectiones Antiquæ of Cælius Rhodiginus, an idea of the vast extent to which the investigation of Latin antiquity had been already carried; though so much was left for the coryphæi of these researches, whom the ensuing age was to produce.

[633] Demiror quis sit ille Alexander ab Alexandro. Novit omnes celebres Italiæ viros, Philelphum, Pomponium Lætum, Hermolaum, et quos non? Omnibus usus est familiariter; tamen nemo novit illum. Append. ad Erasm. Epist. ccclxxiii. (1533). Bayle also remarks, that Alexander is hardly mentioned by his contemporaries. Tiraqueau, a French lawyer of considerable learning, undertook the task of writing critical notes on the Geniales Dies about the middle of the century, correcting many of the errors which they contained.

|Works on Roman antiquities.|

10. A very few books of the same class belong to this period; and may deserve mention, although long since superseded by the works of those to whom we have just alluded, and who filled up and corrected their outline. Marlianus on the Topography of Rome, 1534, is admitted, though with some hesitation, by Grævius into his Thesaurus Antiquitatum Romanarum, while he absolutely sets aside the preceding labours of Blondus Flavius and Pomponius Lætus. The Fasti Consulares were first published by Marlianus in 1549; and a work on the same subject in 1550 was the earliest production of the great Sigonius. Before these the memorable events of Roman history had not been critically reduced to a chronological series. A treatise by Raphael of Volterra de Magistratibus et Sacerdotibus Romanorum is very inaccurate and superficial.[634] Mazochius, a Roman bookseller, was the first who, in 1521, published a collection of inscriptions. This was very imperfect, and full of false monuments. A better appeared in Germany by the care of Apianus, professor of mathematics at Ingoldstadt, in 1534.[635]

[634] It is published in Sallengre, Novus Thesaurus Antiquit. vol. iii.

[635] Burmann, præfat. in Gruter, Corpus Inscriptionum.

|Greek less studied in Italy.|

11. It could not be expected, that the elder and more copious fountain of ancient lore, the Greek language, would slake the thirst of Italian scholars as readily as the Latin. No local association, no patriotic sentiment, could attach them to that study. Greece itself no longer sent out a Lascaris or a Musurus; subdued, degraded, barbarous in language and learning, alien, above all, by insuperable enmity, from the church, she had ceased to be a living guide to her own treasures. Hence we may observe even already, not a diminution, but a less accelerated increase of Greek erudition in Italy. Two however among the most considerable editions of Greek authors, in point of labour, that the century produced, are the Galen by Andrew of Asola in 1525, and the Eustathius from the press of Bladus at Rome in 1542.[636] We may add, as first editions of Greek authors, Epictetus, at Venice, in 1528, and Arrian in 1535; Ælian, at Rome, in 1545. The Etymologicum Magnum of Phavorinus, whose real name was Guarino, published at Rome in 1523, was of some importance, while no lexicon but the very defective one of Craston had been printed. The Etymologicum of Phavorinus, however, is merely “a compilation from Hesychius, Suidas, Phrynichus, Harpocration, Eustathius, the Etymologica, the lexicon of Philemon, some treatises of Trypho, Apollonius, and other grammarians and various scholiasts. It is valuable as furnishing several important corrections of the authors from whom it was collected, and not a few extracts from unpublished grammarians.”[637]

[636] Greswell’s Early Parisian Greek Press, p. 14.

[637] Quarterly Review, vol. xxii. Roscoe’s Leo, ch. xi. Stephens is said to have inserted many parts of this lexicon of Guarino in his Thesaurus. Niceron, xxii. 141.

|Schools of classical learning.|

12. Of the Italian scholars, Vettori, already mentioned, seems to have earned the highest reputation for his skill in Greek. But there was no considerable town in Italy, besides the regular universities, where public instruction in the Greek as well as Latin tongue was not furnished, and in many cases by professors of fine taste and recondite learning, whose names were then eminent; such as Bonamico, Nizzoli, Parrhasio, Corrado, and Maffei, commonly called Raphael of Volterra. Yet, according to Tiraboschi, something was still wanting to secure these schools from the too frequent changes of teachers, which the hope of better salaries produced, and to give the students a more vigorous emulation, and a more uniform scheme of discipline.[638] This was to be supplied by the followers of Ignatius Loyola. But their interference with education in Italy did not begin in quite so early a period as the present.

[638] Vol. viii. 114, x. 319. Ginguéné, vii. 232, has copied Tiraboschi’s account of these accomplished teachers with little addition, and probably with no knowledge of the original sources of information.

|Budæus; his commentaries on Greek.|

13. If we cross the Alps, and look at the condition of learning in countries which we left in 1520 rapidly advancing on the footsteps of Italy, we shall find that, except in purity of Latin style, both France and Germany were now capable of entering the lists of fair competition. France possessed, by general confession, the most profound Greek scholar in Europe, Budæus. If this could before have been in doubt, he raised himself to a pinnacle of philological glory by his Commentarii Linguæ Græcæ, Paris, 1529. The publications of the chief Greek authors by Aldus, which we have already specified, had given a compass of reading to the scholars of this period, which those of the fifteenth century could not have possessed. But, with the exception of the Etymologicum of Phavorinus, just mentioned, no attempt had been made by a native of western Europe to interpret the proper meaning of Greek words; even he had confined himself to compiling from the grammarians. In this large and celebrated treatise, Budæus has established the interpretation of a great part of the language. All later critics write in his praise. There will never be another Budæus in France, says Joseph Scaliger, the most envious and detracting, though the most learned, of the tribe.[639] But, referring to what Baillet and Blount have collected from older writers,[640] we will here insert the character of these Commentaries which an eminent living scholar has given.

[639] Scaligerana, i. 33.

[640] Baillet, Jugemens des Savans, ii. 328. (Amst. 1725) Blount, in Budæo.

|Its character.|

14. “This great work of Budæus has been the text-book and common storehouse of succeeding lexicographers. But a great objection to its general use was its want of arrangement. His observations on the Greek language are thrown together in the manner of a commonplace book, an inconvenience which is imperfectly remedied by an alphabetical index at the end. His authorities and illustrations are chiefly drawn from the prose writers of Greece, the historians, orators, and fathers. With the poets he seems to have had a less intimate acquaintance. His interpretations are mostly correct, and always elegantly expressed; displaying an union of Greek and Latin literature which renders his Commentaries equally useful to the students of both languages. The peculiar value of this work consists in the full and exact account which it gives of the Greek legal and forensic terms, both by literal interpretation, and by a comparison with the corresponding terms in Roman jurisprudence. So copious and exact is this department of the work, that no student can read the Greek orators to the best advantage unless he consults the Commentaries of Budæus. It appears from the Greek epistle subjoined to the work that the illustration of the forensic language of Athens and Rome was originally all that his plan embraced; and that when circumstances tempted him to extend the limits of his work, this still continued to be his chief object.”[641]

[641] Quarterly Review, vol. xxii., an article ascribed to the Bishop of London. The commentaries of Budæus are written in a very rambling and desultory manner, passing from one subject to another as a casual word may suggest the transition. Sic enim, he says, hos commentarios scribere instituimus, ut quicquid in ordinem seriemque scribendi incurreret, vel ex diverticulo quasi obviam se offerret, ad id digredi. A large portion of what is valuable in this work has been transferred by Stephens to his Thesaurus. The Latin criticisms of Budæus have also doubtless been borrowed.

Budæus and Erasmus are fond of writing Greek in their correspondence. Others had the same fancy; and it is curious, that they ventured upon what was wholly gone out of use since the language has been so well understood. But probably this is the reason that later scholars have avoided it. Neither of these great men shine much in elegance or purity. One of Budæus, 15 Aug. 1519, (in Erasm. Epist. cccclv.) seems often incorrect, and in the mere style of a schoolboy.

|Greek grammars and lexicons.|

15. These Commentaries of Budæus stand not only far above any thing else in Greek literature before the middle of the sixteenth century, but are alone in their class. What comes next, but at a vast interval, is the Greek grammar of Clenardus, printed at Louvain in 1530. It was, however, much beyond Budæus in extent of circulation, and probably, for this reason, in general utility. This grammar was continually reprinted with successive improvements, and, defective as, especially in its original state, it must have been, was far more perspicuous than that of Gaza, though not perhaps more judicious in principle. It was for a long time commonly used in France; and is in fact the basis of those lately or still in use among us; such as the Eton Greek grammar. The proof of this is, that they follow Clenardus in most of his rules, erroneous or not, and, nine times or more out of ten, in the choice of instances.[642] The account of syntax in this grammar, as well as that of Gaza, is wretchedly defective. A better treatise, in this respect, is by Varenius of Malines, Syntaxis Linguæ Græcæ, printed at Louvain about 1532. Another Greek grammar by Vergara, a native of Spain, has been extolled by some of the older critics, and depreciated by others.[643] The Greek lexicon, of which the first edition was printed at Basle in 1537, is said to abound in faults and inaccuracies of every description. The character given of it by Henry Stephens, even when it had been enlarged, if not improved, does not speak much for the means that the scholars of this age had possessed in labouring for the attainment of Greek learning.[644]

[642] Clenardus seems first to have separated simple from contracted nouns, thus making ten declensions. Wherever he differs from Gaza, our popular grammars seem to have followed him. He tells us, that he had drawn up this for the use of his private pupils. Baillet observes, that the grammar of Clenardus, notwithstanding the mediocrity of his learning, has had more success than any other; those who have followed having mostly confined themselves to correcting and enlarging it. Jugemens des Savans, ii. 164. This is certainly true, as far as England is concerned; though the Eton grammar, bad as, in the present times, it appears, is in some degree an improvement on Clenardus.

[643] Vergara, De omnibus Græcæ Linguæ Grammaticæ Partibus, 1573; rather 1537, for “deinde Parisiis,” 1550, follows in Antonio, Bibl. Nova.

[644] H. Stephanus, De Typographiæ suæ Statu. Gesner himself says of this lexicon, which sometimes bore his name: Circa annum 1537 lexicon Græco-Latinum, quod jam ante a diversis et innominatis nescio quibus miserè satis consarcinatum erat, ex Phavorini Camertis Lexico Græco ita auxi, ut nihil in eo extaret, quod non ut singulari fide, ita labore maximo adjicerem; sed typographus me inscio, et præter omnem expectationem meam, exiguam duntaxat accessionis meæ partem adjecit, reservans sibi forte auctarium ad sequentes etiam editiones. He proceeds to say, that he enlarged several other editions down to 1556, when the last that had been enriched by his additions appeared at Basle. Cæterum hoc anno, quo hæc scribo, 1562, Genevæ prodiisse audio longe copiosissimum emendatissimumque Græcæ linguæ thesaurum a Rob. Constantino incomparabilis doctrinæ viro, ex Joannis Crispini officinâ. Vide Gesneri Biblioth. Universalis, art. Conrad Gesner: this is part of a long account given here by Gesner of his own works.

|Editions of Greek authors.|

|Latin Thesaurus of R. Stephens.|

16. The most remarkable editions of Greek authors from the Parisian press were those of Aristophanes in 1528, and of Sophocles in 1529; the former printed by Gourmont, the latter by Colinæus; the earliest edition of an entire Diodorus in 1539, of Dionysius Halicarnassensis in 1546, and of Dio Cassius in 1548; the two latter by Robert Stephens. The first Greek edition of the elements of Euclid appeared at Basle in 1533, of Diogenes Laertius the same year, of five books of Diodorus in 1539, of Josephus in 1544; the first of Polybius in 1530, at Haguenaw. Besides these editions of classical authors, Basil, and other of the Greek fathers, occupied the press of Frobenius, under the superintendence of Erasmus. The publications of Latin authors by Badius Ascensius continued till his death in 1535. Colinæus began to print his small editions of the same class at Paris about 1521. They are in that cursive character, which Aldus had first employed.[645] The number of such editions, both in France and Germany, became far more considerable than in the preceding age. They are not, however, in general, much valued for correctness of text; nor had many considerable critics even in Latin philology yet appeared on this side of the Alps. Robert Stephens stands almost alone, who, by the publication of his Thesaurus in 1535, augmented in a subsequent edition of 1543, may be said to have made an epoch in this department of literature. The preceding dictionaries of Calepio and other compilers had been limited to an interpretation of single words, sometimes with reference to passages in the authors who had employed them. This produced, on the one hand, perpetual barbarisms and deviations from purity of idiom, while it gave rise in some to a fastidious hypercriticism, of which Valla had given an example.[646] Stephens first endeavoured to exhibit their proper use, not only in all the anomalies of idiom, but in every delicate variation of sense to which the pure taste and subtle discernment of the best writers had adapted them. Such an analysis is perhaps only possible with respect to a language wherein the extant writers, and especially those who have acquired authority, are very limited in number; and even in Latin, the most extensive dictionary, such as has grown up long since the days of Robert Stephens, under the hands of Gesner, Forcellini, and Facciolati, or such as might still improve upon their labour, could only approach an unattainable perfection. What Stephens himself achieved would now be deemed far too defective for general use; yet it afforded the means of more purity in style than any could in that age have reached without unwearied exertion. Accordingly, it is to be understood, that while a very few scholars, chiefly in Italy, had acquired a facility and exactness of language, which has seldom been surpassed, the general style retained a great deal of barbarism, and neither in single words, nor always in mere grammar, can bear a critical eye. Erasmus is often incorrect, especially in his epistles, and says modestly of himself in the Ciceronianus, that he is hardly to be named among writers at all, unless blotting a great deal of paper with ink is enough to make one. He is, however, among the best of his contemporaries, if a vast command of Latin phrase, and a spirited employment of it, may compensate for some want of accuracy. Budæus, as has been already said, is hard and unpolished. Vives assumes that he has written his famous and excellent work on the corruption of the sciences with some elegance; but this he says in language which hardly warrants the boast.[647] In fact, he is by no means a good writer. But Melancthon excelled Erasmus by far in purity of diction, and correctness of classical taste. With him we may place Calvin in his Institutes, and our countryman Sir John Cheke, as distinguished from most other cisalpine writers of this period by the merit of what is properly called style. Bunel of Toulouse is reckoned the best model of language in this period. The praise, however, of writing pure Latin, or the pleasure of reading it, is dearly bought when accompanied by such vacuity of sense as we experience in the elaborate epistles of Paulus Manutius and the Ciceronian school in Italy.

[645] Greswell’s History of the early Parisian Greek Press.

[646] Vives de causis corrupt. art. (Opera Lud. Vives, edit. Basle, 1555, i. 358.) He observes, in another work, that there was no full and complete dictionary of Latin. Id. p. 475.

[647] Nitorem præterea sermonis addidi aliquem, et quod non expediret res pulcherrimas sordidè ac spuriè vestiri, et ut studiosi elegantiarum [orum?] literarum non perpetuo in vocum et sermonis cognitione adhærescerent; quod hactenus fere accidit, tædio nimirum infrugiferæ ac horridæ molestiæ, quæ in percipiendis artibus diutissimè erat devorata, i. 324.

|Progress of learning in France.|

17. Francis I. has obtained a glorious title, the Father of French literature. The national propensity (or what once was such) to extol kings may have had something to do with this; for we never say the same of Henry VIII. In the early part of his reign he manifested a design to countenance ancient literature by public endowments. War, and unsuccessful war, sufficiently diverted his mind from this scheme. But in 1531, a season of peace, he established the royal college of three languages in the university of Paris, which did not quite deserve its name till the foundation of a Latin professorship in 1534. Vatable was the first professor of Hebrew, and Danés of Greek. In 1545 it appears that there were three professors of Hebrew in the royal college, three of Greek, one of Latin, two of mathematics, one of medicine, and one of philosophy. But this college had to encounter the jealousy of the university, tenacious of its ancient privileges, which it fancied to be trampled upon, and stimulated by the hatred of the pretended philosophers, the scholastic dialecticians, against philological literature. They tried to get the parliament on their side; but that body, however averse to innovation, of which it gave in this age, and long afterwards, many egregious proofs, was probably restrained by the king’s known favour to learning from obstructing the new college as much as the university desired.[648] Danés had a colleague and successor as Greek professor in a favourite pupil of Budæus, and a good scholar, Toussain, who handed down the lamp in 1547 to one far more eminent, Turnebus. Under such a succession of instructors, it may be naturally presumed that the knowledge of Greek would make some progress in France. And no doubt the great scholars of the next generation were chiefly trained under these men. But the opposition of many, and the coldness almost of all, in the ecclesiastical order, among whom that study ought principally to have flourished, impeded in the sixteenth century, as it has perhaps ever since, the diffusion of Grecian literature in all countries of the Romish communion. We do not find much evidence of classical, at least of Greek, learning in any university of France, except that of Paris, to which students repaired from every quarter of the kingdom.[649] But a few once distinguished names of the age of Francis I. deserve to be mentioned. William Cop, physician to the king, and John Ruel, one of the earliest promoters of botanical science, the one translator of Galen, the other of Dioscorides; Lazarus Baif, a poet of some eminence in that age, who rendered two Greek tragedies into French verse; with a few rather more obscure, such as Petit, Pin, Deloin, De Chatel, who are cursorily mentioned in literary history, or to whom Erasmus sometimes alludes. Let us not forget John Grollier, a gentleman who, having filled with honour some public employments, became the first perhaps on this side of the Alps who formed a very extensive library and collection of medals. He was the friend and patron of the learned during a long life; a character little affected in that age by private persons of wealth on the less sunny side of the Alps. Grollier’s library was not wholly sold till the latter part of the seventeenth century.[650]

[648] The faculty of theology in 1530 condemned these propositions: 1. Scripture cannot be well understood without Greek and Hebrew; 2. A preacher cannot explain the epistle and gospel without these languages. In the same year they summoned Danés and Vatable with two more to appear in Parliament, that they might be forbidden to explain scripture by the Greek and Hebrew, without permission of the university; or to say, the Hebrew, or the Greek, is so and so; lest they should injure the credit of the Vulgate. They admitted, however, that the study of Hebrew and Greek was praiseworthy in skilful and orthodox theologians, disposed to maintain the inviolable authority of the Vulgate. Contin. de Fleury, Hist. Ecclesiast., xxvii. 233. See also Gaillard, Hist. de François I., vi. 289.

[649] We find, however, that a Greek and Latin school was set up in the diocese of Sadolet (Carpentras), about 1533; he endeavoured to procure a master from Italy, and seems, by a letter of the year 1540, to have succeeded. Sadol. Epist., lib. ix. and xvi.

[650] Biog. Univ., Grollier.

|Learning in Spain.|

18. In Spain, the same dislike of innovation stood in the way. Greek professorships existed, however, in the universities; and Nunnes, usually called Pincianus (from the Latin name for the city of Valladolid), a disciple of Lebrixa, whom he surpassed, taught the language at Alcala, and afterwards at Salamanca. He was the most learned man Spain had possessed; and his edition of Seneca, in 1536, has obtained the praise of Lipsius.[651] Resende, the pupil of Arias Barbosa and Lebrixa in Greek, has been termed the restorer of letters in Portugal. None of the writings of Resende, except a Latin Grammar, published in 1540, fall within the present period; but he established, about 1531, a school at Lisbon, and one afterwards at Evora, where Estaco, a man rather better known, was educated.[652] School divinity and canon law over-rode all liberal studies throughout the Peninsula; of which the catalogue of books at the end of Antonio’s Bibliotheca Nova is a sufficient witness.

[651] Antonio, Bibl. Nova. Biogr. Univ.

[652] Biogr. Univ.

|Effects of Reformation on learning.|

19. The first effects of the great religious schism in Germany were not favourable to classical literature.[653] An all-absorbing subject left neither relish nor leisure for human studies. Those who had made the greatest advances in learning were themselves generally involved in theological controversy; and, in some countries, had to encounter either personal suffering on account of their opinions, or, at least, the jealousy of a church that hated the advance of knowledge. The knowledge of Greek and Hebrew was always liable to the suspicion of heterodoxy. In Italy, where classical antiquity was the chief object, this dread of learning could not subsist. But few learned much of Greek in these parts of Europe without some reference to theology,[654] especially to the grammatical interpretation of the Scriptures. In those parts which embraced the Reformation a still more threatening danger arose from the distempered fanaticism of its adherents. Men who interpreted the Scripture by the Spirit could not think human learning of much value in religion; and they were as little likely to perceive any other advantage it could possess. There seemed, indeed, a considerable peril, that, through the authority of Carlostadt, or even of Luther, the lessons of Crocus and Mosellanus would be totally forgotten.[655] And this would very probably have been the case, if one man, Melanchthon, had not perceived the necessity of preserving human learning as a bulwark to theology itself, against the wild waves of enthusiasm. It was owing to him that both the study of the Greek and Latin languages, and that of the Aristotelian philosophy, were maintained in Germany. Nor did his activity content itself with animating the universities. The schools of preparatory instruction, which had hitherto furnished merely the elements of grammar, throwing the whole burthen of philological learning on the universities, began before the middle of the century to be improved by Melanchthon, with the assistance of a friend, even superior to him, probably, in that walk of literature, Joachim Camerarius. “Both these great men,” says Eichhorn, “laboured upon one plan, upon the same principle, and with equal zeal; they were, in the strictest sense, the fathers of that pure taste and solid learning by which the next generation was distinguished.” Under the names of Lycæum or Gymnasium, these German schools gave a more complete knowledge of the two languages, and sometimes the elements of philosophy.[656]

[653] Erasm. Epist. passim.

[654] Erasm. Adag. chil. iv. c. v. § 1. Vives, apud Meiners, Vergl. der sitten, ii. 737.

[655] Seckendorf, p. 198.

[656] Eichhorn, iii. 254, et post.

|Sturm’s account of German schools.|

20. We derive some acquaintance with the state of education in this age from the writings of John Sturm, than whom scarce any one more contributed to the cause of letters in Germany. He became in 1538, and continued for above forty years, rector of a celebrated school at Strasburg. Several treatises on education, especially one, De Literarum Ludis rectè instituendis, bear witness to his assiduity. If the scheme of classical instruction which he has here laid down may be considered as one actually in use, there was a solid structure of learning erected in the early years of life, which none of our modern academies would pretend to emulate. Those who feel any curiosity about the details of this course of education, which seems almost too rigorous for practice, will find the whole in Morhof’s Polyhistor.[657] It is sufficient to say, that it occupies the period of life between the ages of six and fifteen, when the pupil is presumed to have acquired a very extensive knowledge of the two languages. Trifling as it may appear to take notice of this subject, it serves at least as a test of the literary pre-eminence of Germany. For we could, as I conceive, trace no such education in France, and certainly not in England.

[657] Lib. ii. c. 10.

|Learning in Germany.|

21. The years of the life of Camerarius correspond to those of the century. His most remarkable works fall partly into the succeeding period; but many of the editions and translations of Greek authors, which occupied his laborious hours, were published before 1550. He was one of the first who knew enough of both languages, and of the subjects treated, to escape the reproach which has fallen on the translators of the fifteenth century. His Thucydides, printed in 1540, was superior to any preceding edition. The universities of Tubingen and Leipsic owed much of their prosperity to his superintending care. Next to Camerarius among the German scholars we may place Simon Grynæus, professor of Greek at Heidelberg in 1523, and translator of Plutarch’s Lives. Micyllus, his successor in this office, and author of a treatise De Re Metrica, of which Melanchthon speaks in high terms of praise, was more celebrated than most of his countymen for Latin poetry. Yet in this art he fell below Eobanus Hessus, whose merit is attested by the friendship of Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Camerarius, as well as by the best verses that Germany had to boast. It would be very easy to increase the list of scholars in that empire; but we should find it more difficult to exhaust the enumeration. Germany was not only far elevated in literary progress above France, but on a level, as we may fairly say, with Italy herself. The university of Marburg was founded in 1526, that of Copenhagen in 1539, of Königsberg in 1544, of Jena in 1548.

|In England. Linacre.|

22. We come now to investigate the gradual movement of learning in England, the state of which about 1520 we have already seen. In 1521, the first Greek characters appear in a book printed at Cambridge, Linacre’s Latin translation of Galen de Temperamentis, and in the title-page, but there only, of a treatise περι Διψαδων [peri Dipsadôn], by Bullock. They are employed several times for quotations in Linacre de Emendata Structura Orationis, 1524.[658] This treatise is chiefly a series of grammatical remarks, relating to distinctions in the Latin language now generally known. It must have been highly valuable, and produced a considerable effect in England, where nothing of that superior criticism had been attempted. In order to judge of its proper merit, it should be compared with the antecedent works of Valla and Perotti. Every rule is supported by authorities; and Linacre, I observe, is far more cautious than Valla in asserting what is not good Latin, contenting himself, for the most part, with showing what is. It has been remarked that, though Linacre formed his own style on the model of Quintilian, he took most of his authorities from Cicero. This treatise, the first fruits of English erudition, was well received, and frequently printed on the Continent. Melanchthon recommended its use in the schools of Germany. Linacre’s translation of Galen has been praised by Sir John Cheke, who in some respects bears rather hardly on his learned precursor.[659]

[658] The author begins by bespeaking the reader’s indulgence for the Greek printing. Pro tuo candore, optime lector, æquo animo feras, si quæ literæ in exemplis Hellenismi vel tonis, vel spiritibus, vel affectionibus careant. Iis enim non satis erat instructus typographus, videlicet recens ab eo fusis characteribus Græcis, nec parata ea copia quæ ad hoc agendum opus est.

[659] Johnson’s Life of Linacre.

|Lectures in the universities.|

23. Croke, who become tutor to the Duke of Richmond, son of Henry VIII., did not remain at Cambridge long after the commencement of this period. But in 1524, Robert Wakefield, a scholar of some reputation, who had been professor in a German university, opened a public lecture there in Greek, endowed with a salary by the king. We know little individually of his hearers; but notwithstanding the confident assertions of Antony Wood, there can be no doubt that Cambridge was, during the whole of this reign, at least on a level with the sister university, and indeed, to speak plainly, above it. Wood enumerates several persons educated at Oxford about this time, sufficiently skilled in Greek to write in that language, or to translate from it, or to comment upon Greek authors. The list might be enlarged by the help of Pits; but he is less of a scholar than Wood. This much, after all, is certain, that the only editions of classical authors published in England before 1540, except those already mentioned, are five of Virgil’s Bucolics, two of a small treatise of Seneca, with one of Publius Syrus; all evidently for the mere use of schoolboys. Lectures in Greek and Latin were, however, established in a few Colleges at Oxford.

|Greek perhaps taught to boys.|

24. If Erasmus, writing in 1528, is to be believed, the English boys were wont to disport in Greek epigrams.[660] But this must be understood as only applicable to a very few, upon whom some extraordinary pains had been bestowed. Thus Sir Thomas Elyot, in his Governor, first published in 1531, points out a scheme of instruction which comprehends the elements of the Greek language. There is no improbability in the supposition, and some evidence to support it, that the masters of our great schools, a Lily, a Cox, an Udal, a Nowell, did not leave boys of quick parts wholly unacquainted with the rudiments of a language they so much valued.[661] It tends to confirm this supposition, that in the statutes of the new cathedrals established by Henry in 1541, it is provided, that there shall be a grammar-school for each, with a head master, “learned in Latin and Greek.” Such statutes, however, are not conclusive evidences that they were put in force.[662] In the statutes of Wolsey’s intended foundation at Ipswich, some years earlier, though the course of instruction is amply detailed, we do not find it extend to the merest elements of Greek.[663] It is curious to compare this with the course prescribed by Sturm for the German schools.

[660] An tu credidisses unquam fore, ut apud Britannos aut Batavos pueri Græcè garrirent, Græcis epigrammatiis non infeliciter luderent? Dial. de Pronuntiatione, p. 48, edit. 1528.

[661] Churton, in his Life of Nowell, says that he taught the Greek testament to the boys at Westminster school, referring for authority to a passage in Strype, which I have not been able to find. There is nothing at all improbable in the fact. These inquiries will be deemed too minute by some in this age. But they are not unimportant in their bearing on the history of literature; and an exaggerated estimate of English learning in the age of the Reformation generally prevails. Sir Thomas Pope, founder of Trinity college, Oxford, observes in a letter to Cardinal Pole in 1556, that when he was “a young scholar at Eton, the Greek tongue was growing apace; the study of which is now alate much decayed.” Warton, iii. 279. I do not think this implies more than a reference to the time, which was about 1520.

[662] Warton, iii. 265.

[663] Strype’s Ecclesiast. Memorials. Appendix, No. 35.

|Teaching of Smith at Cambridge.|

25. But English learning was chiefly indebted for its more rapid advance to two distinguished members of the university of Cambridge, Smith, afterwards secretary of state to Elizabeth, and Cheke. The former began to read the Greek lecture in 1533. And both of them, soon afterwards, combined to bring in the true pronunciation of Greek, upon which Erasmus had already written. The early students of that language, receiving their instructions from natives, had acquired the vicious uniformity of sounds belonging to the corrupted dialect. Reuchlin’s school, of which Melanchthon was one, adhered to this, and were called Itacists, from the continual recurrence of the sound of Iota in modern Greek, being thus distinguished from the Etists of Erasmus’s party.[664] Smith and Cheke proved by testimonies of antiquity, that the latter were right; and “by this revived pronunciation,” says Strype, “was displayed the flower and plentifulness of that language, the variety of vowels, the grandeur of diphthongs, the majesty of long letters, and the grace of distinct speech.”[665] Certain it is, that about this time some Englishmen began to affect a knowledge of Greek. Sir Ralph Saddler, in his embassy to the king of Scotland, in 1540, had two or three Greek words embroidered on the sleeves of his followers, which led to a ludicrous mistake on the part of the Scotch bishops. Scotland, however, herself was now beginning to receive light; the Greek language was first taught in 1534 at Montrose, which continued for many years to be what some call a flourishing school.[666] But the whole number of books printed in Scotland before the middle of the century was only seven. No classical author, or even a grammar, is among these.[667]

[664] Eichhorn, iii. 217. Melanchthon, in his Greek grammar, follows Reuchlin; Luscinius is on the side of Erasmus. Ibid. In very recent publications, I observe that attempts have been made to set up again the “lugubres sonos, et illud flebile iota” of the modern Greeks. To adopt their pronunciation, even if right, would be buying truth very dear.

[665] Strype’s Life of Smith, p. 17. “The strain I heard was of a higher mood.” I wonder what author honest John Strype has copied or translated in this sentence; for he never leaves the ground so far in his own style.

[666] M’Crie’s Life of Knox, i. 6, and note C. p. 342.

[667] The list in Herbert’s History of Printing, iii. 468, begins with the Breviary of the Church of Aberdeen; the first part printed at Edinburgh in 1509, the second in 1510. A poem without date, addressed to James V., De Suscepto Regni Regimine, which seems to be in Latin, and must have been written about 1528, comes the nearest to a learned work. Two editions of Lindsay’s Poems, two of a translation of Hector Boece’s Chronicles, two of a temporary pamphlet called Scotland’s Complaint, with one of the statutes of the kingdom, printed in pursuance of an act of parliament passed in 1540, and a religious tract by one Balnaves, compose the rest.

|Succeeded by Cheke.|

26. Cheke, successor of Smith as lecturer in Greek at Cambridge, was appointed the first royal professor of that language in 1540, with a respectable salary. He carried on Smith’s scheme, if indeed it were not his own, for restoring the true pronunciation, in spite of the strenuous opposition of bishop Gardiner, chancellor of the university. This prelate, besides a literary controversy in letters between himself and Cheke, published at Basle in 1555, interfered, in a more orthodox way, by prohibiting the new style of speech in a decree which, for its solemnity, might relate to the highest articles of faith. Cheke however in this, as in greater matters, was on the winning side; and the corrupt pronunciation was soon wholly forgotten.

|Ascham’s character of Cambridge.|

27. Among the learned men who surrounded Cheke at Cambridge, none was more deserving than Ascham; whose knowledge of ancient languages was not shown in profuse quotation, or enveloped in Latin phrase, but served to enrich his mind with valuable sense, and taught him to transfer the firmness and precision of ancient writers to our own English, in which he is nearly the first that deserves to be named, or that is now read. He speaks in strong terms of his university. “At Cambridge also, in St. John’s college, in my time, I do know that not so much the good statutes as two gentlemen of worthy memory, Sir John Cheke and Dr. Redman, by their only example of excellency in learning, of godliness in living, of diligence in studying, of counsel in exhorting, by good order in all things, did breed up so many learned men in that one college of St. John’s at one time as I believe the whole university of Louvain in many years was never able to afford.”[668] Lectures in humanity, that is, in classical literature, were, in 1535, established by the king’s authority in all colleges of the university of Oxford where they did not already exist; and in the royal injunctions at the same time for the reformation of academical studies a regard to philological learning is enforced.[669]

[668] Ascham’s Schoolmaster. In the Life of Ascham by Grant, prefixed to the former’s Epistles, he enumerates the learned of Cambridge about 1530. Ascham was himself under Pember, homini Græcæ linguæ admirabili facilitate excultissimo. The others named are Day, Redman, Smith, Cheke, Ridley, Grindal (not the archbishop), Watson, Haddon, Pilkington, Horn, Christopherson, Wilson, Seton, et infiniti alii, excellenti doctrinâ præditi. Most of these are men afterwards distinguished in the church on one side or the other. This is a sufficient refutation of Wood’s idle assertion of the superiority of Oxford; the fact seems to have been wholly otherwise. Ascham himself, in a letter without date, but evidently written about the time that the controversy of Cheke and Gardiner began, praises thus the learning of Cambridge. Aristoteles nunc et Plato, quod factum est etiam apud nos hic quinquennium, in sua lingua a pueris leguntur. Sophocles et Euripides sunt hic familiariores, quam olim Plautus fuerat, cum tu hic eras. Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, magis in ore et manibus omnium tenuntur, quam tum Titus Livius, etc. Ibid. p. 74. What then can be thought of Antony Wood when he says, “Cambridge was in the said king’s reign overspread with barbarism and ignorance, as ’tis often mentioned by several authors?” Hist. and Antiq. of Oxford, A.D. 1545.

[669] Warton, iii. 272.

|Wood’s account of Oxford.|

28. Antony Wood, though he is by no means always consistent, gives rather a favourable account of the state of philological learning at Oxford in the last years of Henry VIII. There can, indeed, be no doubt that it had been surprisingly increasing in all England through his reign. More grammar schools, it is said by Knight, were founded in thirty years before the Reformation, meaning, I presume, the age of Henry, than in three hundred years preceding. But the suddenness with which the religious establishment was changed on the accession of Edward, and still more the rapacity of the young king’s council, who alienated or withheld the revenues designed for the support of learning, began to cloud the prospect before the year 1550.[670] Wood, in reading whom allowance is to be made for a strong, though not quite avowed bias towards the old system of ecclesiastical and academical government, inveighs against the visitors of the university appointed by the crown in 1548, for burning and destroying valuable books. And this seems to be confirmed by other evidence. It is true that these books, though it was a vile act to destroy them, would have been more useful to the English antiquary than to the classical student. Ascham, a contemporary protestant, denies that the university of Cambridge declined at all before the accession of Mary in 1553.

[670] Strype, ii. 258. Todd’s Cranmer, ii. 33.

|Education of Edward and his sisters.|

29. Edward himself received a learned education, and, according to Ascham, read the ethics of Aristotle in Greek. Of the princess Elizabeth, his favourite pupil, we have a similar testimony.[671] Mary was not by any means illiterate. It is hardly necessary to mention Jane Grey and the wife of Cecil. Their proficiency was such as to excite the admiration of every one, and is no measure of the age in which they lived. And their names carry us on a little beyond 1550, though Ascham’s visit to the former was in that year.

[671] Of the king he says: Dialecticam didicit, et nunc Græcè discit Aristotelis Ethica. Eo progressus est in Græca lingua, ut in philosophia Ciceronis ex Latinis Græca facillime faciat, Dec. 1550. Ascham, Epist. iv. Elizabeth spoke French and Italian as well as English; Latin fluently and correctly; Greek tolerably. She began every day by reading the Greek Testament, and afterwards the orations of Isocrates, and tragedies of Sophocles. Some years afterwards, in 1555, he writes of her to Sturm: Domina Elizabeth et ego una legimus Græcè orationes Æschinis et Demosthenis περι στεφανου [peri stephanou]. Illa prælegit mihi et primo aspectu tam scienter intelligit non solum proprietatem linguæ et oratoris sensum, sed totam causæ contentionem, populi scita, consuetudinem et mores illius urbis, ut summopere admireris, p. 53. In 1560 he asserts that there are not four persons, in court or college (in aula, in academia), who know Greek better than the queen.

Habemus Angliæ reginam, says Erasmus long before of Catherine, feminan egregiè doctam, cujus filia Maria scribit bene Latinas epistolas. Thomæ Mori domus nihil aliud quam musarum est domicilium. Epist. Mxxxiv.

|The progress of learning is still slow.|

30. The reader must be surprised to find that, notwithstanding these high and just commendations of our scholars, no Greek grammars or lexicons were yet printed in England, and scarcely any works in that or the Latin languages. In fact, there was no regular press in either university at this time, though a very few books had been printed in each about 1520; nor had they one till near the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Reginald Wolfe, a German printer, obtained a patent, dated April 19th, 1541, giving him the exclusive right to print in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and also Greek and Latin grammars, though mixed with English, and charts and maps. But the only productions of his press before the middle of the century, are two homilies of Chrysostom, edited by Cheke in 1543. Elyot’s Latin and English Dictionary, 1538, was the first, I believe, beyond the mere vocabularies of schoolboys; and it is itself but a meagre performance.[672] Latin grammars were of course so frequently published, that it has not been worth while to take notice of them. But the Greek and Latin lexicon of Hadrian Junius, though dedicated to Edward VI., and said to have been compiled in England, (I know not how this could be the case), being the work of a foreigner, and printed at Basle in 1548, cannot be reckoned as part of our stock.[673]

[672] Elyot boasts that this “contains a thousand more Latin words than were together in any one dictionary published in this realm at the time when I first began to write this commentary.” Though far from being a good, or even, according to modern notions, a tolerable dictionary, it must have been of some value at the time. It was afterwards much augmented by Cooper.

[673] Wood ascribes to one Tolley or Tolleius a sort of Greek grammar, Progymnasmata Linguæ Græcæ, dedicated to Edward VI. And Pits, in noticing also other works of the same kind, says of this: Habentur Monachii in Bavaria in bibliotheca ducali. As no mention is made of such a work by Herbert or Dibdin, I had been inclined to think its existence apocryphal. It is certainly foreign.

|Want of books and public libraries.|

31. It must appear on the whole, that under Edward VI. there was as yet rather a commendable desire of learning, and a few vigorous minds at work for their own literary improvement, than any such diffusion of knowledge as can entitle us to claim for that age an equality with the chief continental nations. The means of acquiring true learning were not at hand. Few books, as we have seen, useful to the scholar, had been published in England; those imported were of course expensive. No public libraries of any magnitude had yet been formed in either of the universities; those of private men were exceedingly few. The king had a library, of which honourable mention is made; and Cranmer possessed a good collection of books at Lambeth; but I do not recollect any other person of whom this is recorded.

|Destruction of monasteries no injury to learning.|

32. The progress of philological literature in England was connected with that of the Reformation. The learned of the earlier generation were not all protestants, but their disciples were zealously such. They taunted the adherents of the old religion with ignorance; and though by that might be meant ignorance of the Scriptures, it was by their own acquaintance with languages that they obtained their superiority in this respect. And here I may take notice, that we should be greatly deceived by acquiescing in the strange position of Warton, that the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 and the next two years gave a great temporary check to the general state of letters in England.[674] This writer, however, is inconsistent with himself; for no one had a greater contempt for the monastic studies, dialectics and theology. But, as a desire to aggravate, in every possible respect, the supposed mischiefs of the dissolution of monasteries, is abundantly manifest in many writers later than Warton, I shall briefly observe, that men are deceived, or deceive others, by the equivocal use of the word learning. If good learning, bonæ literæ, which for our present purpose means a sound knowledge of Greek and Latin, was to be promoted, there was no more necessary step in doing so, than to put down bad learning, which is worse than ignorance, and which was the learning of the monks, so far as they had any at all. What would Erasmus have thought of one who should in his days have gravely intimated, that the abolition of monastic foundations would retard the progress of literature? In what protestant country was it accompanied with such a consequence, and from whom, among the complaints sometimes made, do we hear this cause assigned? I am ready to admit, that in the violent courses pursued by Henry VIII. many schools attached to monasteries were broken up, and I do not think it impossible that the same occurred in other parts of Europe. It is also to be fully stated and kept in mind, that by the Reformation the number of ecclesiastics, and consequently of those requiring what was deemed a literate education, was greatly reduced. The English universities, as we are well aware, do not contain by any means the number of students that frequented them in the thirteenth century. But are we therefore a less learned nation than our fathers of the thirteenth century? Warton seems to lament, that “most of the youth of the kingdom betook themselves to mechanical or other illiberal employments, the profession of letters being now supposed to be without support or reward.” Doubtless many who would have learned the Latin accidence, and repeated the breviary, became useful mechanics. But is this to be called, not rewarding the profession of letters? and are the deadliest foes of the Greek and Roman muses to be thus confounded with their worshippers? The loss of a few schools in the monasteries was well compensated by the foundation of others on a more enlightened plan and with much better instructors, and after the lapse of some years, the communication of substantial learning came in the place of that tincture of Latin which the religious orders had supplied. Warton, it should be remarked, has been able to collect the names of not more than four or five abbots and other regulars, in the time of Henry VIII., who either possessed some learning themselves, or encouraged it in others.

[674] Hist. of Engl. Poetry, iii. 268.

|Ravisius Textor.|

33. We may assist our conception of the general state of learning in Europe, by looking at some of the books which were then deemed most usefully subsidiary to its acquisition. Besides the lexicons and grammatical treatises that have been mentioned, we have a work first published about 1522, but frequently reprinted, and in much esteem, the Officina of Ravisius Textor. Of this book Peter Danés, a man highly celebrated in his day for erudition, speaks as if it were an abundant storehouse of knowledge, admirable for the manner of its execution, and comparable to any work of antiquity. In spite of this praise, it is no more than a commonplace book from Latin authors, and from translations of the Greek, and could deserve no regard except in a half-informed generation.

|Conrad Gesner.|

34. A far better evidence of learning was given by Conrad Gesner, a man of prodigious erudition, in a continuation of his Bibliotheca Universalis (the earliest general catalogue of books with an estimate of their merits), to which he gave the rather ambitious title of Pandectæ Universales, as if it were to hold the same place in general science that the Digest of Justinian does in civil law. It is a sort of index to all literature, containing references only, and therefore less generally useful, though far more learned and copious in instances, than the Officina of Ravisius. It comprehends, besides all ancient authors, the schoolmen and other writers of the middle ages. The references are sometimes very short, and more like hints to one possessed of a large library, than guides to the general student. In connection with the Bibliotheca Universalis, it forms a literary history or encyclopædia, of some value to those who are curious to ascertain the limits of knowledge in the middle of the sixteenth century.

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Chapter VI

HISTORY OF THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE IN EUROPE FROM 1520 TO 1550.

Advance of the Reformation--Differences of Opinion--Erasmus--The Protestant Opinions spread farther--Their Prevalence in Italy-- Reaction of Church of Rome--Theological Writings--Luther--Spirit of the Reformation--Translations of Scripture.

|Progress of the Reformation.|

1. The separation of part of Europe from the church of Rome is the great event that distinguishes these thirty years. But as it is not our object to traverse the wide field of civil or ecclesiastical history, it will suffice to make a few observations rather in reference to the spirit of the times, than to the public occurrences that sprung from it. The new doctrine began to be freely preached, and with immense applause of the people, from the commencement of this period, or, more precisely, from the year 1522, in many parts of Germany and Switzerland; the Duke of Deuxponts in that year, or, according to some authorities, in 1523, having led the way in abolishing the ancient ceremonies, and his example having been successively followed in Saxony, Hesse, Brandenburg, Brunswick, many imperial cities, and the kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden, by the disciples of Luther; while those who adhered to Zwingle made similar changes in several cantons of Switzerland.

|Interference of civil power.|

2. The magistrates generally proceeded, especially at the outset, with as great caution and equity as were practicable in so momentous a revolution; though perhaps they did not always respect the laws of the empire. They commonly began by allowing freedom of preaching, and forbad that any one should be troubled about his religion. This, if steadily acted upon, repressed the tumultuous populace, who were eager for demolishing images, the memorials of the old religion, as much as it did the episcopal courts, which, had they been strong enough, might have molested those who so plainly came within their jurisdiction. The Reformation depended chiefly on zealous and eloquent preachers; the more eminent secular clergy, as well as many regulars, having espoused its principles. They encountered no great difficulty in winning over the multitude; and when thus a decisive majority was obtained, commonly in three or four years from the first introduction of free preaching, the government found it time to establish, by a general edict, the abolition of the mass, and of such ceremonies as they did not deem it expedient to retain. The conflict between the two parties in Germany seems to have been less arduous than we might expect. It was usually accompanied by an expulsion of the religious of both sexes from their convents, a measure, especially as to women, unjust and harsh,[675] and sometimes by an alienation of ecclesiastical revenues to the purposes of the state, but this was not universal in Germany, nor was it countenanced by Luther. I cannot see any just reason to charge the Protestant princes of the empire with having been influenced generally by such a motive. In Sweden, however, the proceedings of Gustavus Vasa, who confiscated all ecclesiastical estates, subject only to what he might deem a sufficient maintenance for the possessors, have very much the appearance of arbitrary spoliation.[676]

[675] Bilibald Pirckheimer wrote to Melanchthon complaining that a convent of nuns at Nuremberg, among whom were two of his sisters, had been molested and insulted because they would not accept confessors appointed by the senate. Res eo deducta est ut quicunque miserandas illas offendere et incessere audet, obsequium Deo se præstitisse arbitretur. Idque non solum a viris agitur, sed et a mulieribus; et illis mulieribus, quarum liberis omnem exhibuere caritatem. Non solum enim viris, qui alios docere contendunt, se ipsos vero minime emendant, urbs nostra referta est, sed et mulieribus curiosis, garrulis et otiosis, quæ omnia potius quam domum propriam gubernare satagunt. Pirckheimer Opera, Frankf. 1610, p. 375. He was a moderate man, concurring with the Lutherans in most of their doctrine, but against the violation of monastic vows. Several letters passed between him and Erasmus. The latter, though he could not approve the hard usage of women, hated the monks so much, that he does not greatly disapprove what was done towards them. In Germaniâ multa virginum ac monachorum monasteria crudeliter direpta sunt. Quidam magistratus agunt moderatius. Ejecerunt eos duntaxat, qui illic non essent professi, et vetuerunt novitios recipi; ademerunt illis curam virginum, et jus alibi concionandi quam in suis monasteriis. Breviter, absque magistratus permissu nihil licet illis agere. Videntur huc spectare, ut ex monasteriis faciant parochias. Existimant enim hos conjuratos phalangas et tot privilegiis armatos diutius ferri non posse. (Basil. Aug. 1525.) Epist. Dcccliv. Multis in locis durè tractati sunt monachi; verum plerique cum sint intolerabiles, alia tamen ratione corrigi non possunt. Epist. Dcclvii.

[676] Gerdes Hist. Evangel. Reform. Seckendorf, et alii supra nominati. The best account I have seen of the Reformation in Denmark and Sweden is in the third volume of Gerdes, p. 279, &c.

|Excitement of revolutionary spirit.|

3. But while these great innovations were brought in by the civil power, and sometimes with too despotic a contempt of legal rights, the mere breaking up of old settlements had so disturbed the minds of the people, that they became inclined to further acts of destruction, and more sweeping theories of revolution. It is one of the fallacious views of the Reformation, to which we have adverted in a former page, to fancy that it sprung from any notions of political liberty, in such a sense as we attach to the word. But, inasmuch as it took away a great deal of coercive jurisdiction exercised by the bishops, without substituting much in its place, it did unquestionably relax the bonds of laws not always unnecessary; and inasmuch as the multitude were in many parts instrumental in destroying by force the exterior symbols of the Roman worship, it taught them a habit of knowing and trying the efficacy of that popular argument. Hence the insurrection of the German peasants in 1525 may, in a certain degree, be ascribed to the influence of the new doctrine; and, in fact, one of their demands was the establishment of the Gospel. But as the real cause of that rebellion was the oppressive yoke of their lords, which, in several instances before the Reformation was thought of, had led to similar efforts at relief, we should not lay too much stress on this additional incitement.[677]

[677] Seckendorf.

|Growth of fanaticism.|

4. A more immediate effect of overthrowing the ancient system was the growth of fanaticism, to which, in its worst shape, the antinomian extravagances of Luther yielded too great encouragement. But he was the first to repress the pretences of the Anabaptists;[678] and when he saw the danger of general licentiousness which he had unwarily promoted, he listened to the wiser counsels of Melanchthon, and permitted his early doctrine upon justification to be so far modified, or mitigated in expression, that it ceased to give apparent countenance to immorality; though his differences with the church of Rome, as to the very question from which he had started, thus became of less practical importance, and less tangible to ordinary minds than before.[679] Yet in his own writings we may find to the last such language as to the impossibility of sin in the justified man, who was to judge solely by an internal assurance as to the continuance of his own justification, as would now be universally condemned in all our churches, and is hardly to be heard from the lips of the merest enthusiast.

[678] Id. Melanchthon was a little staggered by the first Anabaptists, who appeared during the concealment of Luther in the castle of Wartburg. Magnis rationibus, he says, adducor certè ut contemnere eos nolim, nam esse in iis spiritus quosdam multis argumentis apparet, sed de quibus judicare præter Martinum nemo facile possit. As to infant baptism, he seemed to think it a difficult question. But the Elector observed that they passed for heretics already, and it would be unwise to moot a new point. Luther, when he came back, rejected the pretences of the Anabaptists at once.

[679] See two remarkable passages in Seckendorf, part ii. p. 90, and p. 106. The æra of what may be called the palinodia of early Lutheranism was in 1527, when Melanchthon drew up instructions for the visitation of the Saxon churches. Luther came into this; but it produced that jealousy of Melanchthon among the rigid disciples, such as Amsdorf and Justus Jonas, which led to the molestation of his latter years. In 1537, Melanchthon writes to a correspondent: Scis me quædam minus horridè dicere, de prædestinatione, de assensu voluntatis, de necessitate obedientiæ nostræ, de peccato mortali. De his omnibus scio re ipsa Lutherum sentire eadem, sed ineruditi quædam ejus Φορτικωτερα [Phortikôtera] dicta, cum non videant quo pertineant, nimium amant. Epist. p. 445. (edit. 1647.)

I am not convinced that this apology for Luther is sufficient. Words are of course to be explained, when ambiguous, by the context and scope of the argument. But when single detached aphorisms, or even complete sentences in a paragraph, bear one obvious sense, I do not see that we can hold the writer absolved from the imputation of that meaning, because he may somewhere else have used a language inconsistent with it. If the Colloquia Mensalia are to be fully relied upon, Luther continued to talk in the same antinomian strain as before, though he grew sometimes more cautious in writing. See chap. xii. of that work; and compare with the passages quoted by Milner, v. 517, from the second edition (in 1536) of his Commentary on the Galatians. It would be well to know if these occur in that of 1519. But Luther had not gone greater lengths than Melanchthon himself.

|Differences of Luther and Zwingle.|

5. It is well known that Zwinglius, unconnected with Luther in throwing off his allegiance to Rome, took in several respects rather different theological views, but especially in the article of the real presence, asserted by the Germans as vigorously as in the Church of Rome, though with a modification sufficient, in the spirit of uncompromising orthodoxy, to separate them entirely from her communion, but altogether denied by the Swiss and Belgian reformers. The attempts made to disguise this division of opinion, and to produce a nominal unanimity by ambiguous and incoherent jargon, belong to ecclesiastical history, of which they form a tedious and not very profitable portion.

|Confession of Augsburg.|

6. The Lutheran princes, who the year before had acquired the name of Protestants, by their protest against the resolutions of the majority in the diet of Spire, presented in 1530 to that held at Augsburg the celebrated confession, which embodies their religious creed. It has been said that there are material changes in subsequent editions, but this is denied by the Lutherans. Their denial can only be as to the materiality, for the fact is clear.[680]

[680] Bossuet, Variations des Eglises Protestantes, vol. i. Seckendorf, p. 170. Clement, Bibliothèque Curieuse, vol. ii. In the editions of 1531 we read: De cœna Domini docent, quod corpus et sanguis Christi vere adsint, et distribuantur vescentibus in cœna Domini, et improbant secus docentes. In those of 1540, it runs thus: De cœna Domini docent, quod cum pane et vino vere exhibeantur corpus et sanguis Christi vescentibus in cœna Domini.

|Conduct of Erasmus.|

7. Meantime, it was not all the former opponents of abuses in the church who now served under the banner of either Luther or Zwingle. Some few, like Sir Thomas More, went violently back to the extreme of maintaining the whole fabric of superstition; a greater number, without abandoning their own private sentiments, shrunk, for various reasons, from an avowed separation from the church. Such we may reckon Faber Stapulensis, the most learned Frenchman of that age after Budæus; such perhaps was Budæus himself;[681] and such were Bilibaldus Pirckheimer,[682] Petrus Mosellanus, Beatus Rhenanus, and Wimpfeling, all men of just renown in their time. Such, above all, was Erasmus himself, the precursor of bolder prophets than himself, who, in all his later years, stood in a very unenviable state, exposed to the shafts of two parties who forgave no man that moderation which was a reproach to themselves. At the beginning of this period, he had certainly an esteem for Melanchthon, Œcolampadius, and other reformers; and though already shocked by the violence of Luther, which he expected to ruin the cause altogether, had not begun to speak of him with disapprobation.[683] In several points of opinion, he professed to coincide with the German reformers; but his own temper was not decisive; he was capable of viewing a subject in various lights; his learning, as well as natural disposition, kept him irresolute; and it might not be easy to determine accurately the tenets of so voluminous a theologian. One thing was manifest, that he had greatly contributed to the success of the Reformation. It was said, that Erasmus had laid the egg, and Luther had hatched it. Erasmus afterwards, when more alienated from the new party, observed, that he had laid a hen’s egg, but Luther had hatched a crow’s.[684] Whatever was the bird, it pecked still at the church. In 1522, came out the Colloquies of Erasmus, a book even now much read, and deserving to be so. It was professedly designed for the instruction and amusement of youth; but both are conveyed at the expense of the prevalent usages in religion. The monkish party could not be blind to its effect. The faculty of theology at Paris, in 1526, led by one Beda, a most bigoted enemy of Erasmus, censured the Colloquies for slighting the fasts of the church, virginity, monkery, pilgrimages, and other established parts of the religious system. They incurred of course the displeasure of Rome, and have several times been forbidden to be read in schools. Erasmus pretended that in his Ιχθυοφαγια [Ichthyophagia] he only turned into ridicule the abuse of fasting, and not the ordinances of the church. It would be difficult, however, to find out this distinction in the dialogue, or, indeed, anything favourable to the ecclesiastical cause in the whole book of Colloquies. The clergy are everywhere represented as idle and corrupt. No one who desired to render established institutions odious could set about it in a shorter or surer way; and it would be strange if Erasmus had not done the church more harm by such publications than he could compensate by a few sneers at the reformers in his private letters. In the single year 1527, Colinæus printed 24,000 copies of the Colloquies, all of which were sold.

[681] Budæus was suspected of Protestantism, and disapproved many things in his own church; but the passages quoted from him by Gerdes, i. 186, prove that he did not mean to take the leap.

[682] Gerdes, vol. i. § 66-83. We have seen above the moderation of Pirckheimer in some respects. I am not sure, however, that he did not comply with the Reformation after it was established at Nuremberg.

[683] Male metuo misero Luthero; sic undique fervet conjuratio; sic undique irritantur in illum principes, ac præcipuè Leo pontifex. Utinam Lutherus meum secutus consilium, ab odiosis illis ac seditiosis abstinuisset. Plus erat fructus et minus invidiæ. Parum esset unum hominem perire; si res hæc illis succedit, nemo feret illorum insolentiam. Non conquiescent donec linguas ac bonas literas omnes subverterint. Epist. Dxxviii Sept. 1520.

Lutherus, quod negari non potest, optimam fabulam susceperat, et Christi pene aboliti negotium summo cum orbis applausu cœperat agere. Sed utinam rem tantam gravioribus ac sedatioribus egisset consiliis, majoreque cum animi calamique moderatione; atque utinam in scriptis illius non essent tam multa bona, aut sua bona non vitiasset malis haud ferendis. Epist. Dcxxxv. 3d Sept. 1521.

[684] Epist. Dccxix. Dec. 1524.

|Estimate of it.|

8. But about the time of this very publication we find Erasmus growing by degrees more averse to the radical innovations of Luther. He has been severely blamed for this by most Protestants; and doubtless, so far as an undue apprehension of giving offence to the powerful, or losing his pensions from the emperor and king of England might influence him, no one can undertake his defence. But it is to be remembered, that he did not by any means espouse all the opinions either of Luther or Zwingle; that he was disgusted at the virulent language too common among the reformers, and at the outrages committed by the populace; that he anticipated great evils from the presumptuousness of ignorant men in judging for themselves in religion; that he probably was sincere in what he always maintained as to the necessity of preserving the communion of the Catholic church, which he thought consistent with much latitude of private faith; and that, if he had gone among the reformers, he must either have concealed his real opinions more than he had hitherto done, or lived, as Melanchthon did afterwards, the victim of calumny and oppression. He had also to allege, that the fruits of the Reformation had by no means shown themselves in a more virtuous conduct; and that many heated enthusiasts were depreciating both all profane studies, and all assistance of learning in theology.[685]

[685] The letters of Erasmus, written under the spur of immediate feelings, are a perpetual commentary on the mischiefs with which the Reformation, in his opinion, was accompanied. Civitates aliquot Germaniæ implentur erroribus, desertoribus monasteriorum, sacerdotibus conjugatis, plerisque famelicis ac nudis. Nec aliud quam saltatur, editur, bibitur ac subatur; nec docent nec discunt; nulla vitæ sobrietas, nulla sinceritas. Ubicunque sunt, ibi jacent omnes bonæ disciplinæ cum pietate (1527) Epist. Dccccii. Satis jam diu audivimus, Evangelium, Evangelium, Evangelium; mores Evangelicos desideramus. Epist. Dccccxlvi. Duo tantum quærunt, censum et uxorem. Cætera præstat illis Evangelium, hoc est, potestatem vivendi ut volunt. Epist. Mvi. Tales vidi mores (Basileæ) ut etiamsi minus displicuissent dogmata, non placuisset tamen cum hujusmodi [sic] fœdus inire. Epist. Mlxvi. Both these last are addressed to Pirckheimer, who was rather more a protestant than Erasmus; so that there is no fair suspicion of temporising. The reader may also look at the 788th and 793d Epistle, on the wild doctrines of the Anabaptists and other reformers, and at the 731st, on the effects of Farel’s first preaching at Basle in 1525. See also Bayle, Farel, note B.

It is become very much the practice with our English writers to censure Erasmus for his conduct at this time. Milner rarely does justice to any one who did not servilely follow Luther. And Dr. Cox, in his life of Melanchthon, p. 35, speaks of a third party, “at the head of which the learned, witty, vacillating, avaricious, and artful Erasmus is unquestionably to be placed.” I do not deny his claim to this place; but why the last three epithets? Can Erasmus be shown to have vacillated in his tenets? If he had done so, it might be no great reproach; but his religious creed was nearly that of the moderate members of the church of Rome, nor have I observed any proof of a change in it. But vacillation may be imputed to his conduct. I hardly think this word is applicable; though he acted from particular impulses, which might make him seem a little inconsistent in spirit; and certainly wrote letters not always in the same tone, according to his own temper at the moment, or that of his correspondent. Nor was he avaricious; at least I know no proof of it; and as to the epithet artful, it ill applies to a man who was perpetually involving himself by an unguarded and imprudent behaviour. Dr. Cox proceeds to charge Erasmus with seeking a cardinal’s hat. But of this there is neither proof nor probability; he always declared his reluctance to accept that honour, and I cannot think that in any part of his life he went the right way to obtain it.

Those who arraign Erasmus so severely (and I am not undertaking the defence of every passage in his voluminous Epistles), must proceed either on the assumption that no man of his learning and ability could honestly remain in the communion of the church of Rome, which is the height of bigotry and ignorance; or that, according to his own religious opinions, it was impossible for him to do so. This is somewhat more tenable, inasmuch as it can only be answered by a good deal of attention to his writings. But from various passages in them, it may be inferred, that, though his mind was not made up on several points, and perhaps for that reason, he thought it right to follow, in assent as well as conformity, the catholic tradition of the church, and above all, not to separate from her communion. The reader may consult, for Erasmus’s opinions on some chief points of controversy, his Epistles, Dcccxxiii., Dcccclxxvii. (which Jortin has a little misunderstood), Mxxxv., Mliii., Mxciii. And see Jortin’s own fair statement of the case, i. 274.

Melanchthon had doubtless a sweeter temper and a larger measure of human charities than Erasmus, nor would I wish to vindicate one great man at the expense of another. But I cannot refrain from saying, that no passage in the letters of Erasmus is read with so much pain as that in which Melanchthon, after Luther’s death, and writing to one not very friendly, says of his connection with the founder of the Reformation, Tuli servitutem pœne deformen, &c. Epist. Melanchthon, p. 21 (edit. 1647). But the characters of literary men are cruelly tried by their correspondence, especially in an age when more conventional dissimulation was authorised by usage than at present.

|His controversy with Luther.|

9. In 1524, Erasmus, at the instigation of those who were resolved to dislodge him from a neutral station his timidity rather affected, published his diatribe, De Libero Arbitrio, selecting a topic upon which Luther, in the opinion of most reasonable men, was very open to attack. Luther answered in a treatise, De Servo Arbitrio, flinching not, as suited his character, from any tenet because it seemed paradoxical, or revolting to general prejudice. The controversy ended with a reply of Erasmus, entitled Hyperaspistes.[686] It is not to be understood, from the titles of these tracts, that the question of free will was discussed between Luther and Erasmus in a philosophical sense; though Melanchthon, in his Loci Communes, like the modern Calvinists, had combined the theological position of the spiritual inability of man with the metaphysical tenet of general necessity. Luther on most occasions, though not uniformly, acknowledged the freedom of the will as to indifferent actions, and also as to what they called the works of the law. But he maintained that, even when regenerated and sanctified by faith and the Spirit, man had no spiritual free will; and as before that time he could do no good, so after it, he had no power to do ill; nor, indeed, could he, in a strict sense, do either good or ill, God always working in him, so that all his acts were properly the acts of God, though, man’s will being of course the proximate cause, they might, in a secondary sense, be ascribed to him. It was this that Erasmus denied, in conformity with the doctrine afterwards held by the council of Trent, by the church of England, and, if we may depend on the statements of writers of authority, by Melanchthon and most of the later Lutherans. From the time of this controversy Luther seems to have always spoken of Erasmus with extreme ill-will; and if the other was a little more measured in his expressions, he fell not a jot behind in dislike.[687]

[686] Seckendorf took hold of a few words in a letter of Erasmus, to insinuate that he had taken a side against his conscience in writing his treatise, De Libero Arbitrio. Jortin, acute as he was, seems to have understood the passage the same way, and endeavours to explain away the sense, as if he meant only that he had undertaken the task unwillingly. Milner of course repeats the imputation; though it must be owned that, perceiving the absurdity of making Erasmus deny what in all his writings appears to have been his real opinion, he adopts Jortin’s solution. I am persuaded that they are all mistaken, and that Erasmus was no more referring to his treatise against Luther, than to the Trojan war. The words occur in an answer to a letter of Vives, written from London, wherein he had blamed some passages in the Colloquies on the usual grounds of their freedom as to ecclesiastical practices. Erasmus, rather piqued at this, after replying to the observations, insinuates to Vives, that the latter had not written of his own free will, but at the instigation of some superior. Verum, ut ingenue dicam, perdidimus liberum arbitrium. Illic mihi aliud dictabat animus, aliud scribebat calamus. By a figure of speech far from unusual, he delicately suggests his own suspicion as Vives’s apology. And the next letter of Vives leaves no room for doubt: Liberum arbitrium non perdidimus, quod tu asserueris,--words, that could have no possible meaning upon the hypothesis of Seckendorf. There is nothing in the context that can justify it; and it is equally difficult to maintain the interpretation Jortin gives of the phrase, aliud dictabat animus, aliud scribebat calamus, which can mean nothing but that he wrote what he did not think. The letters are Dcccxxix. Dccclxxi. Dccclxxvi. in Erasmus’s Epistles; or the reader may turn to Jortin, i. 413.

[687] Many of Luther’s strokes at Erasmus occur in the Colloquia Mensalia, which I quote from the translation. “Erasmus can do nothing but cavil and flout, he cannot confute.” “I charge you in my will and testament, that you hate and loath Erasmus, that viper.” ch. xliv. “He called Erasmus an epicure and ungodly creature, for thinking that if God dealed with men here on earth as they deserved, it would not go so ill with the good, or so well with the wicked.” ch. vii. Lutherus, says the other, sic respondit (diatribæ De Libero Arbitrio), ut antehac in neminem virulentius; et homo suavis post editum librum per literas dejerat se in me esse animo candidissimo, ac propemodum postulat, ut ipsi gratias agam, quod me tam civiliter tractavit, longe aliter scripturus si cum hoste fuisset res. Ep. Dcccxxxvi.

|Character of his epistles.|

10. The epistles of Erasmus, which occupy two folio volumes in the best edition of his works, are a vast treasure for the ecclesiastical and literary history of his times. Morhof advises the student to commonplace them; a task which, even in his age, few would have spared leisure to perform, and which the good index of the Leyden edition renders less important. Few men carry on so long and extensive a correspondence without affording some vulnerable points to the criticism of posterity. The failings of Erasmus have been already adverted to; it is from his own letters that we derive our chief knowledge of them. An extreme sensibility to blame in his own person, with little regard to that of others; a genuine warmth of friendship towards some, but an artificial pretence of it too frequently assumed; an inconsistency of profession both as to persons and opinions, partly arising from the different character of his correspondents, but in a great degree from the varying impulses of his ardent mind, tend to abate that respect which the name of Erasmus at first excites, and which, on a candid estimate of his whole life, and the tenor even of this correspondence, it ought to retain. He was the first conspicuous enemy of ignorance and superstition, the first restorer of Christian morality on a scriptural foundation, and, notwithstanding the ridiculous assertion of some moderns that he wanted theological learning, the first who possessed it in its proper sense, and applied it to its proper end.

|His alienation from the reformers increases.|

11. In every succeeding year the letters of Erasmus betray increasing animosity against the reformers. He had long been on good terms with Zwingle and Œcolampadius, but became so estranged by these party differences, that he speaks of their death with a sort of triumph.[688] He still however kept up some intercourse with Melanchthon. The latter years of Erasmus could not have been happy; he lived in a perpetual irritation from the attacks of adversaries on every side; his avowed dislike of the reformers by no means assuaging the virulence of his original foes in the church, or removing the suspicion of lukewarmness in the orthodox cause. Part of this should fairly be ascribed to the real independence of his mind in the formation of his opinions, though not always in their expression, and to their incompatibility with the extreme doctrines of either side. But an habitual indiscretion, the besetting sin of literary men, who seldom restrain their wit, rendered this hostility far more general than it need have been, and, accompanied as it was with a real timidity of character, exposed him to the charge of insincerity, which he could better palliate by the example of others than deny to have some foundation. Erasmus died in 1536, having returned to Basle, which, on pretence of the alterations in religion, he had quitted for Friburg in Brisgau a few years before. No differences of opinion had abated the pride of the citizens of Basle in their illustrious visitor. Erasmus lies interred in their cathedral, the earliest, except Œcolampadius, in the long list of the literary dead, which has rendered that cemetery conspicuous in Europe.

[688] Bene habet, quod duo Coryphæi perierint, Zuinglius in acie, Œcolampadius paulo post febri et apostemate. Quod si illis favisset ενυαλιορ [enyalior], actum fuisset de nobis. Epist. Mccv. It is of course to be regretted, that Erasmus allowed this passage to escape him, even in a letter. With Œcolampadius he had long carried on a correspondence. In some book the latter had said, Magnus Erasmus noster. This was at a time when much suspicion was entertained of Erasmus, who writes rather amusingly, in Feb. 1525, to complain, telling Œcolampadius that it was best neither to be praised nor blamed by his party; but if they must speak of him, he would prefer their censure to being styled noster. Epist. Dccxxviii. Milner quotes this, leaving poor Erasmus to his reader’s indignation for what he would insinuate to be a piece of the greatest baseness. But in good truth, what right had Œcolampadius to use the word noster, if it could be interpreted as claiming Erasmus to his ownside? He was not theirs as Œcolampadius well knew, in exterior profession nor theirs in the course they had seen fit to pursue.

It is just towards Erasmus to mention, that he never dissembled his affection for Lewis Berquin, the first martyr to protestantism in France, who was burned in 1528, even in the time of his danger. Epist. Dcccclxxvi. Erasmus had no more inveterate enemies than in the university of Paris.

|Appeal of the reformers to the ignorant.|

12. The most striking effect of the first preaching of the Reformation was that it appealed to the ignorant; and though political liberty, in the sense we use the word, cannot be reckoned the aim of those who introduced it, yet there predominated that revolutionary spirit which loves to witness destruction for its own sake, and that intoxicated self-confidence which renders folly mischievous. Women took an active part in religious dispute; and though in many respects the Roman catholic religion is very congenial to the female sex, we cannot be surprised that many ladies might be good protestants against the right of any to judge better than themselves. The translation of the New Testament by Luther in 1522, and of the Old a few years later, gave weapons to all disputants; it was common to hold conferences before the burgomasters of German and Swiss towns, who settled the points in controversy, one way or other, perhaps as well as the learned would have done.

|Parallel of those times with the present.|

13. We cannot give any attention to the story of the Reformation, without being struck by the extraordinary analogy it bears to that of the last fifty years. He who would study the spirit of this mighty age may see it reflected as in a mirror from the days of Luther and Erasmus. Man, who, speaking of him collectively, has never reasoned for himself, is the puppet of impulses and prejudices, be they for good or for evil. These are, in the usual course of things, traditional notions and sentiments, strengthened by repetition, and running into habitual trains of thought. Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive any thing as true, or seek its own interest in any manner, but as its forefathers have opined or acted. Change in these respects has been, even in Europe, where there is most of flexibility, very gradual; the work, not of argument or instruction, but of exterior circumstances slowly operating through a long lapse of time. There have been, however, some remarkable exceptions to this law of uniformity, or, if I may use the term, of secular variation. The introduction of Christianity seems to have produced a very rapid subversion of ancient prejudices, a very conspicuous alteration of the whole channel through which moral sentiments flow, in nations that have at once received it. This has also not unfrequently happened through the influence of Mohammedism in the East. Next to these great revolutions in extent and degree, stand the two periods we have begun by comparing; that of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, and that of political innovation wherein we have long lived. In each, the characteristic features are a contempt for antiquity, a shifting of prejudices, an inward sense of self-esteem leading to an assertion of private judgment in the most uninformed, a sanguine confidence in the amelioration of human affairs, a fixing of the heart on great ends with a comparative disregard of all things intermediate. In each there has been so much of alloy in the motives, and, still more, so much of danger and suffering in the means, that the cautious and moderate have shrunk back, and sometimes retraced their own steps, rather than encounter evils which at a distance they had not seen in their full magnitude. Hence we may pronounce with certainty what Luther, Hutten, Carlostadt, what again More, Erasmus, Melanchthon, Cassander, would have been in the nineteenth century, and what our own contemporaries would have been in their times. But we are too apt to judge others, not as the individualities of personal character and the varying aspects of circumstances rendered them, and would have rendered us, but according to our opinion of the consequences, which, even if estimated by us rightly, were such as they could not determinately have foreseen.

|Calvin.|

|His Institutes.|

14. In 1531, Zwingle lost his life on the field of battle. It was the custom of the Swiss that their pastors should attend the citizens in war to exhort the combatants, and console the dying. But the reformers soon acquired a new chief in a young man superior in learning and probably in genius, John Calvin, a native of Noyon in Picardy. His Institutions, published in 1536, became the text-book of a powerful body, who deviated in some few points from the Helvetic school of Zwingle. They are dedicated to Francis I., in language, good, though not perhaps as choice as would have been written in Italy, temperate, judicious, and likely to prevail upon the general reader, if not upon the king. This treatise was the most systematic and extensive defence and exposition of the protestant doctrine which had appeared. Without the over-strained phrases and wilful paradoxes of Luther’s earlier writings, the Institutes of Calvin seem to contain most of his predecessor’s theological doctrine, except as to the corporal presence. He adopted a middle course as to this, and endeavoured to distinguish himself from the Helvetic divines. It is well known that he brought forward the predestinarian tenets of Augustin more fully than Luther, who seems however to have maintained them with equal confidence. They appeared to Calvin, as doubtless they are, clearly deducible from their common doctrine as to the sinfulness of all natural actions, and the arbitrary irresistible conversion of the passive soul by the power of God. The city of Geneva, throwing off subjection to its bishop, and embracing the reformed religion in 1536, invited Calvin to an asylum, where he soon became the guide and legislator, though never the ostensible magistrate, of the new republic.

|Increased differences among reformers.|

15. The Helvetian reformers at Zurich and Bern were now more and more separated from the Lutherans; and in spite of frequent endeavours to reconcile their differences, each party, but especially the latter, became as exclusive and nearly as intolerant as the church which they had quitted. Among the Lutherans themselves, those who rigidly adhered to the spirit of their founder’s doctrine, grew estranged, not externally, but in language and affection, from the followers of Melanchthon.[689] Luther himself, who never withdrew his friendship from the latter, seems to have been alternately under his influence, and that of inferior men. The Anabaptists, in their well-known occupation of Munster, gave such proof of the tremendous consequences of fanaticism, generated, in great measure, by the Lutheran tenet of assurance, that the paramount necessity of maintaining human society tended more to silence these theological subtilties, than any arguments of the same class. And from this time that sect, if it did not lose all its enthusiasm, learned how to regulate it in subordination to legal and moral duties.

[689] Amsdorfius Luthero scripsit, viperam eum in sinu alere, me significans, omitto alia multa. Epist. Melanchthon, p. 450 (edit. 1647). Luther’s temper seems to have grown more impracticable as he advanced in life. Melanchthon threatened to leave him. Amsdorf and that class of men flattered his pride. See the following letters. In one, written about 1549, he says: Tuli etiam antea servitutem pæne deformem, cum sæpe Lutherus magis suæ naturæ, in qua φιλονεικια [philoneikia] erat haud exigua, quam vel personæ suæ, vel utilitati communi serviret, p. 21. This letter is too apologetical and temporising. Nec movi has controversias quæ distraxerunt rempublicam; sed incidi in motas, quæ cum et multæ essent et inexplicatæ, quodam simplici studio quaerendæ veritatis, præsertim cum multi docti et sapientes initio applauderent, considerare eas cœpi. Et quamquam materias quasdam horridiores autor initio miscuerat, tamen alia vera et necessaria non putavi rejicienda esse. Hæc cum excerpta amplecterer, paulatim aliquas absurdas opiniones vel sustuli vel lenii. Melanchthon should have remembered, that no one had laid down these opinions with more unreserve, or in a more “horrid” way of disputation than himself in the first edition of his Loci Communes. In these and other passages, he endeavours to strike at Luther for faults which were equally his own, though doubtless not so long persisted in.

Melanchthon, in the first edition of the Loci Communes, which will scarcely be found except in Von der Hardt, sums up the free will question thus:

Si ad prædestinationem referas humanum voluntatem, nec in externis, nec in internis operibus ulla est libertas, sed eveniunt omnia juxta destinationem divinam.

Si ad opera externa referas voluntatem, quædam videtur esse, judicio naturæ, libertas.

Si ad affectus referas voluntatem, nulla plane libertas est, etiam naturæ judicio. This proves what I have said in another place, that Melanchthon held the doctrine of strict philosophical necessity. Luther does the same, in express words, once at least in the treatise De Servo Arbitrio, vol. ii. fol. 429 (edit. Wittenberg, 1554).

In an epistle often quoted, Melanchthon wrote: Nimis horridæ fuerunt apud nostros disputationes de fato, et disciplinæ nocuerunt. But a more thoroughly ingenuous man might have said nostros for apud nostros. Certain it is, however, that he had changed his opinions considerably before 1540, when he published his Moralis Philosophiæ Epitome, which contains evidence of his holding the synergism, or activity and co-operation with divine grace, of the human will. See p. 39.

The animosity excited in the violent Lutherans by Melanchthon’s moderation in drawing up the confession of Augsburg is shown in Camerarius, Vita Melanchthon, p. 124 (edit. 1696). From this time it continued to harass him till his death.

|Reformed tenets spread in England.|

|In Italy.|

16. England, which had long contained the remnants of Wicliffe’s followers, could not remain a stranger to this revolution. Tyndale’s New Testament was printed at Antwerp in 1526; the first translation that had been made into English. The cause of this delay has been already explained; and great pains were taken to suppress the circulation of Tyndale’s version. But England was then inclined to take its religion from the nod of a capricious tyrant. Persecution would have long repressed the spirit of free judgment, and the king, for Henry’s life at least, have retained his claim to the papal honour conferred on him as defender of the faith, if “Gospel light,” as Gray has rather affectedly expressed it, had not “flashed from Boleyn’s eyes.” But we shall not dwell on so trite a subject. It is less familiar to every one, that in Italy the seeds of the Reformation were early and widely sown. A translation of Melanchthon’s Loci Communes under the name of Ippofilo da Terra Nigra, was printed at Venice in 1521, the very year of its appearance at Wittenberg; the works of Luther, Zwingle, and Bucer, were also circulated under false names.[690] The Italian translations of Scripture made in the fifteenth century were continually reprinted; and in 1530 a new version was published at Venice by Brucioli, with a preface written in a protestant tone.[691] The great intercourse of Italy with the cisalpine nations, through war and commerce, and the partiality of Renée of France, duchess of Ferrara, to the new doctrines, whose disciples she encouraged at her court, under the pretext of literature, contributed to spread an active spirit of inquiry. In almost every considerable city, between 1525 and 1540, we find proofs of a small band of protestants, not in general abandoning the outward profession of the church, but coinciding in most respects with Luther or Zwingle. It has lately been proved that a very early proselyte to the Reformation, and one whom we should least expect to find in that number, was Berni, before the completion, if not the commencement, of his labour on the Orlando Innamorato; which he attempted to render in some places the vehicle of his disapprobation of the church. This may account for the freedom from indecency which distinguishes that poem, and contrasts with the great licentiousness of Berni’s lighter and earlier productions.[692]

[690] M’Crie’s Hist. of Reformation in Italy. Epigrams were written in favour of Luther as early as 1521 (p. 32).

[691] Id. p. 53, 55.

[692] This curious and unexpected fact was brought to light by Mr. Panizzi, who found a short pamphlet of extreme scarcity, and unnoticed, I believe, by Zeno or any other bibliographer (except Niceron, xxxviii. 76), in the library of Mr. Grenville. It is written by Peter Paul Vergerio, and printed at Basle in 1554. This contains eighteen stanzas, intended to have been prefixed by Berni to the twentieth canto of the Orlando Innamorato. They are of a decidedly protestant character. For these stanzas others are substituted in the printed editions, much inferior, and, what is remarkable, almost the only indecent passage in the whole poem. Mr. Panizzi is of opinion, that great liberties have been taken with the Orlando Innamorato, which is a posthumous publication, the earliest edition being at Venice, 1541, five years after the author’s death. Vergerio, in this tract, the whole of which has been reprinted by Mr. P. in iii. 361 of his Boiardo, says of Berni: Costui quasi agli ultimi suoi anni non fù altro che carne e mondo; di che ci fanno ampia fede alcuni suoi capitoli e poesie, delle quali egli molti fogli imbrattò. Ma perchè il nome suo era scritto nel libro della vita, ne era possibile ch’egli potesse fuggire delle mani del celeste padre, &c. Veggendo egli che questo gran tiranno non permittea onde alcuno potesse comporre all’aperta di quei libri, per li quali altri possa penetrare nella cognizione del vero, andando attorno per le man d’ognuno un certo libro profano chiamato innamoramento d’Orlando, che era inetto e mal composto, il Berna [sic] s’immaginò di fare un bel trattato; e ciò fù ch’egli si pose a racconciare le rime e le altre parti di quel libro, di che esso n’era ottimo artefice, e poi aggiungendovi di suo alcune stanze, pensò di entrare con questa occasione e con quel mezzo (insin che d’Altro migliore ne avesse potuto avere) ad insegnare la verità dell’Evangelio, &c. Whether Vergerio is wholly to be trusted in all this account, more of which will be found on reference to Panizzi’s edition of the Orlando Innamorato, I must leave to the competent reader. The following expressions of Mr. P., though, I think, rather strong, will show the opinion of one conversant with the literature and history of those times. “The more we reflect on the state of Italy at that time, the more have we reason to suspect that the reforming tenets were as popular among the higher classes in Italy in those days, as liberal notions in ours.” P. 361.

|Italian heterodoxy.|

17. The Italians are an imaginative, but not essentially a superstitious people, or liable, nationally speaking, to the gloomy prejudices that master the reason. Among the classes, whose better education had strengthened and developed the acuteness and intelligence so general in Italy, a silent disbelief of the popular religion was far more usual than in any other country. In the majority, this has always taken the turn of a complete rejection of all positive faith; but, at the æra of the Reformation especially, the substitution of Protestant for Romish Christianity was an alternative to be embraced by men of more serious temperaments. Certain it is, that we find traces of this aberration from orthodoxy, in one or the other form, through much of the literature of Italy, sometimes displaying itself only in censures of the vices of the clergy; censures, from which, though in other ages they had been almost universal, the rigidly Catholic party began now to abstain. We have already mentioned Pontanus and Mantuan. Trissino, in his Italia Liberata, introduces a sharp invective against the church of Rome.[693] The Zodiacus Vitæ of Manzolli, whose assumed Latin name, by which he is better known, was Palingenius Stellatus, teems with invectives against the monks, and certainly springs from a protestant source.[694] The first edition is of 1537, at Basle. But no one writer is more indignantly severe than Alamanni.[695]

[693] This passage, which is in the sixteenth canto, will be found in Roscoe’s Leo X., Append. No. 164; but the reader would be mistaken in supposing, as Roscoe’s language seems to imply, that it is only contained in the first edition of 1548. The fact is that Trissino cancelled these lines in the unsold copies of that edition, so that very few are found to contain them; but they are restored in the edition of the Italia Liberata, printed at Verona in 1729.

[694] The Zodiacus Vitæ is a long moral poem, the books of which are named from the signs of the zodiac. It is not very poetical, but by no means without strong passages of sense and spirit in a lax Horatian metre. The author has said more than enough to incur the suspicion of Lutheranism. I have observed several proofs of this; the following will suffice:--

Sed tua præsertim non intret limina quisquam Frater, nec monachus, vel quavis lege sacerdos. Hos fuge; pestis enim nulla hac immanior; hi sunt Fæx hominum, fons stultitiæ, sentina malorum, Agnorum sub pelli lupi, mercede colentes, Non pietate Deum; falsa sub imagine vecti Decipiunt stolidos, ac religionis in umbra Mille actus vetitos, et mille piacula condunt, &c. Leo (lib. 5).

I could find, probably, more decisive Lutheranism in searching through the poem, but have omitted to make notes in reading it.

[695] Ahi cieca gente, che l’hai troppo ’n pregio; Tu credi ben, che questa ria semenza Habbian più d’Altri gratia e privilegio; Ch’altra trovi hoggi in lei vera scienza Che di simulation, menzogne e frodi. Beato ’l mondo, che sarà mai senza, &c. Satir. i.

The twelfth Satire concludes with a similar execration, in the name of Italy, against the church of Rome.

|Its progress in the literary classes.|

18. This rapid, though rather secret progress of heresy among the more educated Italians, could not fail to alarm their jealous church. They had not won over the populace to their side; for, though censures on the superior clergy were listened to with approbation in every country, there was little probability that the Italians would generally abjure modes of faith so congenial to their national temper as to have been devised, or retained from heathen times, in compliance with it. Even of those who had associated with the reformers, and have been in consequence reckoned among them, some were far from intending to break off from a church which had been identified with all their prejudices and pursuits. Such was Flaminio, one of the most elegant of poets and best of men; and such was the accomplished and admirable Vittoria Colonna.[696] But those who had drunk deeper of the cup of free thought had no other resource, when their private assemblies had been detected, and their names proscribed, than to fly beyond the Alps. Bernard Ochino, a Capuchin preacher of great eminence, being summoned to Rome, and finding his death resolved upon, fled to Geneva. His apostacy struck his admirers with astonishment, and possibly put the Italians more on their guard against others. Peter Martyr, well known afterwards in England, soon followed him; the academy of Modena, a literary society highly distinguished, but long suspected of heresy, was compelled, in 1542, to subscribe a declaration of faith; and though Lombardy was still full of secret protestants, they lived in continual terror of persecution during the rest of this period. The small reformed church of Ferrara was broken up in 1550; many were imprisoned and one put to death.[697]

[696] M’Crie discusses at length the opinions of these two, p. 164-177, and seems to leave those of Flaminio in doubt; but his letters, published at Nuremberg in 1571, speak in favour of his orthodoxy.

[697] Besides Dr. M’Crie’s History of the Reformation in Italy, which has thrown a collected light upon a subject interesting and little familiar, I have made use of his predecessor Gerdes, Specimen Italiæ Reformatæ; of Tiraboschi, viii. 150; of Giannone, iv. 108, et alibi; and of Galluzzi, Istoria del Gran Ducato, ii. 292, 369.

|Servetus.|

19. Meantime the natural tendency of speculative minds to press forward, though checked at this time by the inflexible spirit of the leaders of the Reformation, gave rise to some theological novelties. A Spanish physician, Michael Reves, commonly called Servetus, was the first to open a new scene in religious innovation. The ancient controversies on the Trinity had long subsided; if any remained whose creed was not unlike that of the Arians, we must seek for them among the Waldenses, or other persecuted sects. But even this is obscure; and Erasmus, when accused of Arianism, might reply with apparent truth, that no heresy was more extinct. Servetus, however, though not at all an Arian, framed a scheme, not probably quite novel, which is a difficult matter, but sounding very unlike what was deemed orthodoxy. Being an imprudent and impetuous man, he assailed the fundamental doctrines of reformers as much as of the Catholic church, with none of the management necessary in such cases, as the title of his book, printed in 1531, De Trinitatis Erroribus, is enough to show. He was so little satisfied with his own performance, that in a second treatise, called Dialogues on the Trinity, he retracts the former as ill written, though without having changed any of his opinions. These works are very scarce and obscurely worded, but the tenets seem to be nearly what are called Sabellian.[698]

[698] The original editions of the works of Servetus very rarely occur: but there are reprints of the last century, which themselves are by no means common.

|Arianism in Italy.|

20. The Socinian writers derive their sect from a small knot of distinguished men, who met privately at Vicenza about 1540; including Lælius Socinus, at that time too young to have had any influence, Ochino, Gentile, Alciati, and some others. This fact has been doubted by Mosheim and M’Crie, and does not rest on much evidence; while some of the above names are rather improbable.[699] It is certain, however, that many of the Italian reformers held anti-trinitarian opinions, chiefly of the Arian form. M’Crie suggests, that these had been derived from Servetus; but it does not appear that they had any acquaintance, or concurred in general with him, who was very far from Arianism; and it is much more probable that their tenets originated among themselves. If, indeed, it were necessary to look for an heresiarch, a Spanish gentleman, resident at Naples, by name Valdes, is far more likely than Servetus. It is agreed that Valdes was one of the chief teachers of the Reformation in Italy; and he has also been supposed to have inclined towards Arianism.[700]

[699] Lubienecius, Hist. Reformat. Polonicæ. M’Crie’s Hist. of Reformation in Italy, p. 154.

[700] Dr. M’Crie is inclined to deny the Arianism of Valdes, and says it cannot be found in his writings (p. 122); others have been of a different opinion. See Chalmers’s Dictionary, art. Valdesso, and Bayle. His considerations were translated into English in 1638; I can find no evidence as to this point one way or the other in the book itself, which betrays a good deal of fanaticism, and confidence in the private teaching of the Spirit. The tenets are high Lutheranism as to human action, and derived perhaps from the Loci Communes of Melanchthon. Beza condemned the book.

|Protestants in Spain and Low Countries.|

21. Even in Spain, the natural soil of tenacious superstition, and the birthplace of the Inquisition, a few seeds of Protestantism were early sown. The first writings of Luther were translated into Spanish soon after their appearance; the Holy Office began to take alarm about 1530. Several suspected followers of the new creed were confined in monasteries, and one was burnt at Valladolid in 1541.[701] But in no country, where the Reformation was severely restrained by the magistrate, did it spread so extensively as in the Netherlands. Two Augustine monks were burned at Brussels in 1523, and their death had the effect, as Erasmus tells us, of increasing prodigiously the number of heretics.[702] From that time a bitter persecution was carried on, both by destroying books, and punishing their readers; but most of the seventeen provinces were full of sectaries.

[701] M’Crie’s Hist. of Reformation in Spain.

[702] Cœpta est carnificina. Tandem Bruxellæ tres Augustinenses [duo?] publicitus affecti sunt supplicio. Quæris exitum? Ea civitas antea purissima cœpit habere Lutheri discipulos, et quidem non paucos. Sævitum est et in Hollandiâ. Quid multis? Ubicunque fumos excitavit nuncius, ubicunque sævitiam exercuit Carmelita, ibi diceres fuisse factam hæresion sementem. Ep. Mclxiii. The history of the Reformation in the Low Countries has been copiously written by Gerard Brandt, to whose second and third books I refer the reader.

|Order of Jesuits.|

22. Deeply shaken by all this open schism and lurking disaffection, the church of Rome seemed to have little hope in the superstition of the populace, the precarious support of the civil power, or the quarrels of her adversaries. But she found an unexpected source of strength in her own bosom; a green shoot from the yet living trunk of an aged tree. By a bull, dated the 27th of September, 1540, Paul III. established the order of Jesuits, planned a few years before by Ignatius Loyola. The leading rules of this order were, that a general should be chosen for life, whom every Jesuit was to obey as he did God; and that besides the three vows of the regulars, poverty, chastity, and obedience, he should promise to go wherever the pope should command. They were to wear no other dress than the clergy usually did; no regular hours of prayer were enjoined; but they were bound to pass their time usefully for their neighbours, in preaching, in the direction of consciences, and the education of youth. Such were the principles of an institution which has, more effectually than any other, exhibited the moral power of a united association in moving the great unorganised mass of mankind.

|Their popularity.|

23. The Jesuits established their first school in 1546, at Gandia in Valencia, under the auspices of Francis Borgia, who derived the title of duke from that city. It was erected into a university by the pope and king of Spain.[703] This was the commencement of that vast influence they were speedily to acquire by the control of education. They began about the same time to scatter their missionaries over the East. This had been one of the great objects of their foundation. And when news was brought, that thousands of barbarians flocked to the preaching of Francis Xavier, that he had poured the waters of baptism on their heads, and raised the cross over the prostrate idols of the East, they had enough, if not to silence the envy of competitors, at least to secure the admiration of the Catholic world. Men saw in the Jesuits courage and self-devotion, learning and politeness; qualities the want of which had been the disgrace of monastic fraternities. They were formidable to the enemies of the church; and those who were her friends cared little for the jealousy of the secular clergy, or for the technical opposition of lawyers. The mischiefs and dangers that might attend the institution were too remote for popular alarm.

[703] Fleury, Hist. Eccles. xxix. 221.

|Council of Trent.|

24. In the external history of protestant churches, two events, not long preceding the middle of the sixteenth century, served to compensate each other,--the unsuccessful league of the Lutheran princes of Germany, ending in their total defeat, and the establishment of the reformed religion in England by the council of Edward VI. It admits however of no doubt, that the principles of the Reformation were still progressive, not only in those countries where they were countenanced by the magistrate, but in others, like France and the Low Countries, where they incurred the risk of martyrdom. Meantime Paul III. had, with much reluctance, convoked a general council at Trent. This met on the 13th of December, 1545; and after determining a large proportion of the disputed problems in theology, especially such as related to grace and original sin, was removed by the pope in March, 1547, to his own city of Bologna, where they sat but a short time before events occurred which compelled them to suspend their sessions. They did not reassemble till 1551.

|Its chief difficulties.|

25. The greatest difficulties which embarrassed the council of Trent, appear to have arisen from the clashing doctrines of scholastic divines, especially the respective followers of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, embattled as rival hosts of Dominicans and Franciscans.[704] The fathers endeavoured, as far as possible, to avoid any decision which might give too unequivocal a victory to either; though it has generally been thought, that the former, having the authority of Augustin, as well as their own great champion, on their side, have come off, on the whole, superior in the decisions of the council.[705] But we must avoid these subtilties, into which it is difficult not to slide when we touch on such topics.

[704] Fleury, xxix., 154, et alibi. F. Paul, lib. ii. and iii. passim.

[705] It is usual for protestant writers to inveigh against the Tridentine fathers. I do not assent to their decision, which is not to the purpose, nor vindicate the intrigues of the papal party. But I must presume to say, that, reading their proceedings in the pages of that very able and not very lenient historian, to whom we have generally recourse, an adversary as decided as any that could have come from the reformed churches, I find proofs of much ability, considering the embarrassments with which they had to struggle, and of an honest desire of reformation, among a large body, as to those matters which, in their judgment, ought to be reformed. The notes of Courayer on Sarpi’s history, though he is not much less of a protestant than his original, are more candid, and generally very judicious. Pallavicini I have not read: but what is valuable in him will doubtless be found in the continuation of Fleury, vol. xxix. et alibi.

|Character of Luther.|

26. In the History of the Reformation, Luther is incomparably the greatest man. We see him, in the skilful composition of Robertson, the chief figure of a group of gownsmen, standing in contrast on the canvas with the crowned rivals of France and Austria, and their attendant warriors, but blended in the unity of that historic picture. This amazing influence on the revolutions of his own age, and on the opinions of mankind, seems to have produced, as is not unnatural, an exaggerated notion of his intellectual greatness. It is admitted on all sides, that he wrote his own language with force and purity; and he is reckoned one of its best models. The hymns in use with the Lutheran church, many of which are his own, possess a simple dignity and devoutness, never, probably, excelled in that class of poetry, and alike distinguished from the poverty of Sternhold or Brady, and from the meretricious ornament of later writers. But, from the Latin works of Luther, few readers, I believe, will rise without disappointment. Their intemperance, their coarseness, their inelegance, their scurrility, their wild paradoxes, that menace the foundations of religious morality, are not compensated, so far at least as my slight acquaintance with them extends, by much strength or acuteness, and still less by any impressive eloquence. Some of his treatises, and we may instance his reply to Henry VIII., or the book “against the falsely-named order of bishops,” can be described as little else than bellowing in bad Latin. Neither of these books display, as far as I can judge, any striking ability. It is not to be imagined, that a man of his vivid parts fails to perceive an advantage in that close grappling, sentence by sentence, with an adversary, which fills most of his controversial writings; and in scornful irony he had no superior. His epistle to Erasmus, prefixed to the treatise De servo Arbitrio, is bitterly insolent in terms as civil as he could use. But the clear and comprehensive line of argument, which enlightens the reader’s understanding, and resolves his difficulties, is always wanting. An unbounded dogmatism, resting on an absolute confidence in the infallibility, practically speaking, of his own judgment, pervades his writings; no indulgence is shown, no pause allowed, to the hesitating; whatever stands in the way of his decisions, the fathers of the church, the schoolmen and philosophers, the canons and councils, are swept away in a current of impetuous declamation; and as everything contained in Scripture, according to Luther, is easy to be understood, and can only be understood in his sense, every deviation from his doctrine incurs the anathema of perdition. Jerome, he says, far from being rightly canonised, must, but for some special grace, have been damned for his interpretation of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans.[706] That the Zwinglians, as well as the whole church of Rome, and the Anabaptists, were shut out by their tenets from salvation, is more than insinuated in numerous passages of Luther’s writings. Yet he had passed himself through several changes of opinion. In 1518, he rejected auricular confession; in 1520, it was both useful and necessary; not long afterwards, it was again laid aside. I have found it impossible to reconcile, or to understand, his tenets concerning faith and works; and can only perceive, that, if there be any reservation in favour of the latter, not merely sophistical, of which I am hardly well convinced, it consists in distinctions too subtle for the people to apprehend. These are not the oscillations of the balance in a calm understanding, conscious of the difficulty which so often attends the estimate of opposite presumptions, but alternate gusts of dogmatism, during which, for the time, he was as tenacious of his judgment as if it had been uniform.

[706] Infernum potius quam cœlum Hieronymus meruit; tantum abest ut ipsum canonizare aut sanctum esse audeam dicere. Vol. ii. fol. 478. (Witt. 1554.)

27. It is not impossible, that some offence will be taken at this character of his works by those who have thought only of the man; extraordinary as he doubtless was in himself, and far more so as the instrument of mighty changes on the earth. Many of late years, especially in Germany, without holding a single one of Luther’s more peculiar tenets, have thought it necessary to magnify his intellectual gifts. Frederic Schlegel is among these; but in his panegyric there seems a little wish to insinuate, that the reformer’s powerful understanding had a taint of insanity. This has not unnaturally occurred to others, from the strange tales of diabolical visions Luther very seriously recounts, and from the inconsistencies as well as the extravagance of some passages. But the total absence of self-restraint, with the intoxicating effects of presumptuousness, is sufficient to account for aberrations, which men of regular minds construe into actual madness. Whether Luther were perfectly in earnest as to his personal interviews with the devil, may be doubtful; one of them he seems to represent as internal.

|Theological writings. Erasmus.|

28. Very little of theological literature, published between 1520 and 1550, except such as bore immediately on the great controversies of the age, has obtained sufficient reputation to come within our researches, which, upon this most extensive portion of ancient libraries, do not extend to disturb the slumbers of forgotten folios. The paraphrase of Erasmus was the most distinguished work in scriptural interpretation. Though not satisfactory to the violent of either party, it obtained the remarkable honour of being adopted in the infancy of our own protestantism. Every parish church in England, by an order of council in 1547, was obliged to have a copy of this paraphrase. It is probable, or rather obviously certain, that this order was not complied with.[707]

[707] Jortin says that, “taking the Annotations and the Paraphrase of Erasmus together, we have an interpretation of the New Testament as judicious and exact as could be made in his time, and to which very few deserve to be preferred of those which have since been published.” ii. 91.

|Melanchthon. Romish writers.|

29. The Loci Communes of Melanchthon have already been mentioned. The writings of Zwingle, collectively published in 1544, did not attain equal reputation; with more of natural ability than erudition, he was left behind in the general advance of learning. Calvin stands on higher ground. His Institutes are still in the hands of that numerous body who are usually denominated from him. The works of less conspicuous advocates of the Reformation, which may fall within this earlier period of controversy, will not detain us; nor is it worth while to do more on this occasion than mention the names of a few once celebrated men in the communion of Rome, Vives, Cajetan, Melchior Cano, Soto, and Catharin.[708] The two latter were prominent in the council of Trent, the first being of the Dominican party, or that of Thomas Aquinas, which was virtually that of Augustin; the second a Scotist, and in some points deviating a little from what passed for the more orthodox tenets either in the catholic or protestant churches.[709]

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

[709] Sarpi and Fleury, passim.

|This literature nearly forgotten.|

30. These elder champions of a long war, especially the Romish, are, with a very few exceptions, known only by their names and lives. These are they, and many more there were down to the middle of the seventeenth century, at whom, along the shelves of an ancient library, we look and pass by. They belong no more to man, but to the worm, the moth, and the spider. Their dark and ribbed backs, their yellow leaves, their thousand folio pages, do not more repel us than the unprofitableness of their substance. Their prolixity, their barbarous style, the perpetual recurrence, in many, of syllogistic forms, the reliance, by way of proof, on authorities that have been abjured, the temporary and partial disputes, which can be neither interesting nor always intelligible at present, must soon put an end to the activity of the most industrious scholar.[710] Even the coryphæi of the Reformation are probably more quoted than read, more praised than appreciated; their works, though not scarce, are voluminous and expensive; and it may not be invidious to surmise, that Luther and Melanchthon serve little other purpose, at least in England, than to give an occasional air of erudition to a theological paragraph, or to supply its margin with a reference that few readers will verify. It will be unnecessary to repeat this remark hereafter; but it must be understood as applicable, with such few exceptions as will from time to time appear, throughout at least the remainder of the sixteenth century.

[710] Eichhorn.

|Sermons.|

31. No English treatise on a theological subject, published before the end of 1550, seems to deserve notice in the general literature of Europe, though some may be reckoned interesting in the history of our Reformation. The sermons of Latimer, however, published in 1548, are read for their honest zeal and lively delineation of manners. They are probably the best specimens of a style then prevalent in the pulpit, and which is still not lost in Italy, nor among some of our own sectaries; a style that came at once home to the vulgar, animated and effective, picturesque and intelligible, but too unsparing both of ludicrous associations and commonplace invective. The French have some preachers, earlier than Latimer, whose great fame was obtained in this manner, Maillard and Menot. They belong to the reign of Louis XII. I am but slightly acquainted with the former, whose sermons, printed if not preached in Latin, with sometimes a sort of almost macaronic intermixture of French, appeared to me very much inferior to those of Latimer. Henry Stephens, in his Apologie pour Herodote, has culled many passages from these preachers, in proof of the depravity of morals in the age before the Reformation. In the little I have read of Maillard, I did not find many ridiculous, though some injudicious passages; but those who refer to the extracts of Niceron, both from him and Menot, will have as much gratification, as consummate impropriety and bad taste can furnish.[711]

[711] Niceron, vols. xxiii. and xxiv. If these are the original sermons, it must have been the practice in France, as it was in Italy, to preach in Latin; but Eichhorn tells us that the sermons of the fifteenth century, published in Germany, were chiefly translated from the mother tongue. vi. 113. Tauler certainly preached in German, yet Eichhorn in another place (iii. 282), seems to represent Luther and his protestant associates as the first who used that language in the pulpit.

|Spirit of the Reformation.|

32. The vital spirit of the Reformation, as a great working in the public mind, will be inadequately discerned in the theological writings of this age. Two controversies overspread their pages, and almost efface more important and more obvious differences between the old and the new religions. Among the Lutherans, the tenet of justification or salvation by faith alone, called, in the barbarous jargon of polemics, solifidianism, was always prominent: it was from that point their founder began; it was there that, long afterwards, and when its original crudeness had been mellowed, Melanchthon himself thought the whole principle of the contest was grounded.[712] In the disputes again of the Lutherans with the Helvetic reformers, as well as in those of the latter school, including the church of England, with that of Rome, the corporal or real presence (which are synonymous with the writers of that century) in the Lord’s supper was the leading topic of debate. But in the former of these doctrines, after it had been purged from the Antinomian extravagances of Luther, there was found, if not absolutely a verbal, yet rather a subtle, and by no means practical, difference between themselves and the church of Rome;[713] while, in the Eucharistic controversy, many of the reformers bewildered themselves, and strove to perplex their antagonists, with incompatible and unintelligible propositions, to which the mass of the people paid as little regard as they deserved. It was not for these trials of metaphysical acuteness that the ancient cathedrals shook in their inmost shrines; and though it would be very erroneous to deny, that many not merely of the learned laity, but of the inferior ranks, were apt to tread in such thorny paths, we must look to what came closer to the apprehension of plain men for their zeal in the cause of reformed religion, and for the success of that zeal. The abolition of saint-worship, the destruction of images, the sweeping away of ceremonies, of absolutions, of fasts and penances, the free circulation of the Scriptures, the communion in prayer by the native tongue, the introduction, if not of a good, yet of a more energetic and attractive style of preaching than had existed before; and besides this, the eradication of monkery which they despised, the humiliation of ecclesiastical power which they hated, the immunity from exactions which they resented, these are what the north of Europe deemed its gain by the public establishment of the Reformation, and to which the common name of protestantism was given. But it is rather in the history, than in the strictly theological literature of this period, that we are to seek for the character of that revolution in religious sentiment, which ought to interest us from its own importance, and from its analogy to other changes in human opinion.

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

[713] Burnet on eleventh article.

|Limits of private judgment.|

33. It is often said, that the essential principle of protestantism, and that for which the struggle was made, was something different from all we have mentioned, a perpetual freedom from all authority in religious belief, or what goes by the name of the right of private judgment. But, to look more nearly at what occurred, this permanent independence was not much asserted and still less acted upon. The Reformation was a change of masters; a voluntary one, no doubt, in those who had any choice; and in this sense, an exercise, for the time, of their personal judgment. But no one having gone over to the confession of Augsburg, or that of Zurich, was deemed at liberty to modify those creeds at his pleasure. He might of course become an Anabaptist or an Arian; but he was not the less a heretic in doing so, than if he had continued in the church of Rome. By what light a protestant was to steer, might be a problem which at that time, as ever since, it would perplex a theologian to decide; but in practice, the law of the land, which established one exclusive mode of faith was the only safe, as, in ordinary circumstances, it was, upon the whole, the most eligible guide.

|Passions instrumental in Reformation.|

34. The adherents to the church of Rome have never failed to cast two reproaches on those who left them: one, that the reform was brought about by intemperate and calumnious abuse, by outrages of an excited populace, or by the tyranny of princes; the other, that after stimulating the most ignorant to reject the authority of their church, it instantly withdrew this liberty of judgment, and devoted all who presumed to swerve from the line drawn by law, to virulent obloquy, or sometimes to bonds and death. These reproaches, it may be a shame for us to own, “can be uttered, and cannot be refuted.” But, without extenuating what is morally wrong, it is permitted to observe that the protestant religion could, in our human view of consequences, have been established by no other means. Those who act by calm reason are always so few in number, and often so undeterminate in purpose, that without the aid of passion and folly, no great revolution can be brought about. A persuasion of some entire falsehood, in which every circumstance converges to the same effect on the mind; an exaggerated belief of good or evil disposition in others; a universal inference peremptorily derived from some particular case; these are what sway mankind, not the simple truth, with all its limits and explanations, the fair partition of praise and blame, or the measured assent to probability that excludes not hesitation. That condition of the heart and understanding which renders men cautious in their judgment, and scrupulous in their dealings, unfits them for revolutionary seasons. But of this temper there is never much in the public. The people love to be told that they can judge; but they are conscious that they can act. Whether a saint in sculpture ought to stand in the niches of their cathedrals, it was equally tedious and difficult to inquire; that he could be defaced, was certain; and this was achieved. It is easy to censure this as precipitancy; but it was not a mere act of the moment; it was, and much more was of the same kind, the share that fell naturally to the multitude in a work which they were called to fulfil, and for which they sometimes encountered no slight danger.

|Establishment of new dogmatism.|

35. But, if it were necessary, in the outset of the Reformation, to make use of that democratic spirit of destruction, by which the populace answered to the bidding of Carlostadt or of Knox, if the artizans of Germany and Switzerland were to be made arbiters of controversy, it was not desirable that this reign of religious anarchy should be more than temporary. Protestantism, whatever, from the generality of the word, it may since be considered, was a positive creed; more distinctly so in the Lutheran than in the Helvetic churches, but in each, after no great length of time, assuming a determinate and dogmatic character. Luther himself, as has been already observed, built up before he pulled down; but the confession of Augsburg was the first great step made in giving the discipline and subordination of regular government to the rebels against the ancient religion. In this, however, it was taken for granted, that their own differences of theological opinion were neither numerous nor inevitable: a common symbol of faith, from which no man could dissent without criminal neglect of the truth or blindness to it, seemed always possible, though never attained; the pretensions of catholic infallibility were replaced by a not less uncompromising and intolerant dogmatism, availing itself, like the other, of the secular power, and arrogating to itself, like the other, the assistance of the Spirit of God. The mischiefs that have flowed from this early abandonment of the right of free inquiry are as evident as its inconsistency with the principles upon which the reformers had acted for themselves; yet, without the confession of Augsburg and similar creeds, it may be doubtful whether the protestant churches would have possessed a sufficient unity to withstand their steady, veteran adversaries, either in the war of words, or in those more substantial conflicts to which they were exposed for the first century after the Reformation. The schism of the Lutheran and Helvetic protestants did injury enough to their cause; a more multitudinous brood of sectaries would, in the temper of those times, have been such a disgrace as it could not have overcome. It is still very doubtful, whether the close phalanx of Rome can be opposed, in ages of strong religious zeal, by anything except established or at least confederate churches.

|Editions of Scripture.|

36. We may conclude this section with mentioning the principal editions of translations of Scripture published between 1520 and 1550. The Complutensian edition of the New Testament, suspended since the year 1514, when the printing was finished, became public in 1522. The Polyglott of the Old Testament, as has been before mentioned, had appeared in 1517. An edition of the Septuagint and of the Greek Testament was published at Strasburg by Cephalæus in 1524 and 1526. The New Testament appeared at Haguenaw in 1521, and from the press of Colinæus at Paris in 1534; another at Venice in 1538. But these, which have become very scarce, were eclipsed in reputation by the labours of Robert Stephens, who printed three editions in 1546, 1549, and 1550; the two former of a small size, the last in folio. In this he consulted more manuscripts than any earlier editor had possessed; and his margin is a register of their various readings. It is therefore, though far from the most perfect, yet the first endeavour to establish the text on critical principles.

|Translations of Scripture.|

|English.|

37. The translation of the Old and New Testament by Luther is more renowned for the purity of its German idiom, than for its adherence to the original text. Simon has charged him with ignorance of Hebrew; and when we consider how late he came to the study of either that or the Greek language, and the multiplicity of his employments, it may be believed that his knowledge of them was far from extensive.[714] From this translation, however, and from the Latin Vuglate, the English one of Tyndale and Coverdale, published in 1535 or 1536, is avowedly taken.[715] Tyndale had printed his version of the New Testament in 1526. That of 1537, commonly called Matthew’s Bible, from the name of the printer, though in substance the same as Tyndale’s, was superintended by Rogers, the first martyr in the persecution of Mary, who appears to have had some skill in the original languages. The Bible of 1539, more usually called Cranmer’s Bible, was certainly revised by comparison with the original. It is however questionable, whether there was either sufficient leisure, or adequate knowledge of the Hebrew and Greek languages, in the reign of Henry VIII., to consummate so arduous a task as the thorough censure of the Vulgate text.

[714] Simon, Hist. Critique, V. T., p. 432. Andrès, xix. 160. Eichhorn however says, that Luther’s translation must astonish any impartial judge, who reflects on the lamentable deficiency of subsidiary means in that age, iii. 317. The Lutherans have always highly admired this work on account of its pure Germanism: it has been almost as ill spoken of among Calvinists as by the Catholics themselves. St. Aldegonde says, it is farther from the Hebrew than any one he knows; ex qua manavit nostra ex vitiosa Germanicâ facta vitiosior Belgico-Teutonica. Gerdes, iii. 60.

[715] Tyndale’s translation of the Pentateuch had been published in 1530. It has been much controverted of late years, whether he were acquainted or not with Hebrew.

|In Italy and Low Countries.|

38. Bruccioli of Venice published a translation of the Scriptures into Italian, which he professes to have formed upon the original text.[716] It was retouched by Marmocchini, and printed as his own in 1538. Zaccarias, a Florentine monk, gave another version in 1542, taken chiefly from his two predecessors. The earlier translation of Malerbi passed through twelve editions in this century.[717] The Spanish New Testament by Francis de Enzina was printed at Antwerp in 1543, as the Pentateuch in the same language was by some Jews at Constantinople in 1547.[718] Olaus Petri, the chief ecclesiastical adviser of Gustavus Vasa, translated the Scriptures into Swedish, and Palladius into Danish, before the middle of the century. But in no language were so many editions of Scripture published as in that of Flanders or Holland; the dialects being still more slightly different, I believe, at that time than they are now. The old translation from the Vulgate, first printed at Delft in 1497, appeared several times before the Reformation from the presses of Antwerp and Amsterdam. A Flemish version of the New Testament from that of Luther came out at Antwerp in 1522, the very year of its publication at Wittenberg; and twelve times more in the next five years. It appears from the catalogue of Panzer, that the entire Bible was printed in the Flemish or Dutch language, within the first thirty-six years of the sixteenth century, in fifteen editions, one of which was at Louvain, one at Amsterdam, and the rest at Antwerp. Thirty-four editions of the New Testament alone in that language appeared within the same period; twenty-four of them at Antwerp.[719] Most of these were taken from Luther, but some from the Vulgate. There can be no sort of comparison between the number of these editions, and consequently the eagerness of the people of the Low Countries for biblical knowledge, considering the limited extent of their language, and anything that could be found in the protestant states of the empire.

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

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

[718] This translation, which could have been of little use, was printed in Hebrew characters, with the original, and with a version in modern Greek, but in the same characters. It was reprinted in 1553 by some Italian Jews, in the ordinary letter. This Spanish translation is of considerable antiquity, appearing by the language to be of the twelfth century: it was made for the use of the Spanish Jews, and preserved privately in their synagogues and schools. This is one out of several translations of Scripture that were made in Spain during the middle ages; one of them, perhaps, by order of Alfonso X. Andrès, xix. 151. But in the sixteenth century, even before the alarm about the progress of heresy began in Spain, a stop was put to their promulgation, partly through the suspicions entertained of the half-converted Jews. Id. 183. The translation of Enzina, a suspected protestant, was of course not well received, and was nearly suppressed. Id. ibid. M’Crie’s Hist. of the Reformation in Spain.

[719] Panzer, Annales Typographici, Index.

|Latin translations.|

39. Notwithstanding the authority given to the Vulgate by the church of Rome, it has never been forbidden either to criticise the text of that version, or to publish a new one. Sanctes Pagninus, an oriental scholar of some reputation, published a translation of the Old and New Testament at Lyons in 1528. This has been reckoned too literal, and consequently obscure and full of solecisms. That of Sebastian Munster, a more eminent Hebraist, printed at Basle in 1534, though not free from oriental idioms, which indeed very few translations have been, or perhaps rightly can be, and influenced, according to some, by the false interpretations of the rabbins, is more intelligible. Two of the most learned and candid Romanists, Huet and Simon, give it a decided preference over the version of Pagninus. Another translation by Leo Juda and Bibliander, at Zurich in 1543, though more elegant than that of Munster, deviates too much from the literal sense. This was reprinted at Paris in 1545 by Robert Stephens, with notes attributed to Vatable.[720]

[720] Simon, Hist. Crit. du V. T. Biogr. Univ. Eichhorn, v. 565, et post. Andrès, xix. 165.

|French translations.|

40. The earliest protestant translation in French is that by Olivetan at Neufchatel in 1535. It has been said that Calvin had some share in this edition; which, however, is of little value, except from its scarcity, if it be true that the text of the version from the Vulgate, by Faber Stapulensis, has been merely retouched. Faber had printed this, in successive portions some time before; at first in France; but the parliament of Paris, in 1525, having prohibited his translation, he was compelled to have recourse to the press of Antwerp. This edition of Faber appeared several times during the present period. The French Bible of Louvain, which is that of Faber, revised by the command of Charles V., appeared as a new translation in 1550.[721]

[721] Idem.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter VII

HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE, MORAL, AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, AND OF JURISPRUDENCE IN EUROPE, FROM 1520 TO 1550.

SECT. I. 1520-1550.

Speculative Philosophy.

|Logic included under this head.|

1. Under this head we shall comprehend not only what passes by the loose, yet not unintelligible, appellation metaphysics, but those theories upon the nature of things, which, resting chiefly upon assumed dogmas, could not justly be reduced to the division of physical science. The distinction may sometimes be open to cavil; but every man of a reflecting mind will acknowledge the impossibility of a rigorous classification of books. The science of logic, not only for the sake of avoiding too many partitions, but on account of its peculiar connection, in this period of literature, with speculative philosophy, will be comprised in the same department.

|Slow defeat of scholastic philosophy.|

2. It might be supposed that the old scholastic philosophy, the barbarous and unprofitable disputations which occupied the universities of Europe for some hundred years, would not have endured much longer against the contempt of a more enlightened generation. Wit and reason, learning and religion, combined their forces to overthrow the idols of the schools. They had no advocates able enough to say much in their favour; but established possession, and that inert force which ancient prejudices retain, even in a revolutionary age, especially when united with civil and ecclesiastical authority, rendered the victory of good sense and real philosophy very slow.

|It is sustained by the universities and regulars.|

3. The defenders of scholastic disputation availed themselves of the commonplace plea, that its abuses furnished no conclusion against its use. The barbarousness of its terminology might be in some measure discarded; the questions which had excited ridicule might be abandoned to their fate; but it was still contended that too much of theology was involved in the schemes of school philosophy erected by the great doctors of the church to be sacrificed for heathen or heretical innovations. The universities adhered to their established exercises; and though these, except in Spain, grew less active, and provoked less emulation, they at least prevented the introduction of any more liberal course of study. But the chief supporters of scholastic philosophy, which became, in reality or in show, more nearly allied to the genuine authority of Aristotle, than it could have been, while his writings were unknown or ill translated, were found, after the revival of letters, among the Dominican or Franciscan orders; to whom the Jesuits, inferior to none in acuteness, lent, in process of time, their own very powerful aid.[722] Spain was, above all countries, and that for a very long time, the asylum of the schoolmen; and this seems to have been one among many causes, which have excluded, as we may say, the writers of that kingdom, with but few exceptions, from the catholic communion of European literature.

[722] Brucker, iv. 117, et post. Buhle has drawn copiously from his predecessor, ii. 448.

|Commentators on Aristotle.|

4. These men, or many of them, at least towards the middle of the century, were acquainted with the writings of Aristotle. But commenting upon the Greek text, they divided it into the smallest fragments, gave each a syllogistic form, and converted every proposition into a complex series of reasonings, till they ended, says Buhle, in an endless and insupportable verbosity. “In my own labours upon Aristotle,” he proceeds, “I have sometimes had recourse, in a difficult passage, to these scholastic commentators, but never gained anything else by my trouble than an unpleasant confusion of ideas; the little there is of value being scattered and buried in a chaos of endless words.”[723]

[723] ii. 417.

|Attack of Vives on scholastics.|

5. The scholastic method had the reformers both of religion and literature against it. One of the most strenuous of the latter was Ludovic Vives, in his great work, De corruptis Artibus et tradendis Disciplinis. Though the main object of this is the restoration of what were called the studies of humanity (humaniores literæ), which were ever found incompatible with the old metaphysics, he does not fail to lash the schoolmen directly in parts of this long treatise, so that no one, according to Brucker, has seen better their weak points or struck them with more effect. Vives was a native of Valencia, and at one time preceptor to the princess Mary in England.[724]

[724] Brucker, iv. 87. Meiners (Vergleich. der Sitten, ii. 730-755), has several extracts from Vives as to the scholasticism of the beginning of this century. He was placed by some of his contemporaries in a triumvirate with Erasmus and Budæus.

|Contempt of them in England.|

6. In the report of the visitation of Oxford, ordered by Henry VIII. in 1535, contempt for the scholastic philosophy is displayed in the triumphant tone of conquerors. Henry himself had been an admirer of Thomas Aquinas. But the recent breach with the see of Rome made it almost necessary to declare against the schoolmen, its steadiest adherents. And the lovers of ancient learning, as well as the favourers of the Reformation, were gaining ground in the English government.[725]

[725] Wood’s Hist. of University of Oxford. The passage wherein Antony Wood deplores the “setting Duns in Bocardo” has been often quoted by those who make merry with the lamentations of ignorance.

|Veneration for Aristotle.|

7. But while the subtle, though unprofitable, ingenuity of the Thomists and Scotists was giving way, the ancient philosophy, of which that of the scholastic doctors was a corruption, restored in its genuine lineaments, kept possession of the field with almost redoubled honour. What the doctors of the middle ages had been in theology, that was Aristotle in all physical and speculative science; and the church admitted him into an alliance of dependency for her own service. The Platonic philosophy, to which the patronage of the Medici and the writings of Ficinus had given countenance in the last century, was much fallen, nor had, at this particular time, any known supporters in Europe. Those who turned their minds to physical knowledge, while they found little to their purpose in Plato, were furnished by the rival school with many confident theories and some useful truth. Nor was Aristotle without adherents among the conspicuous cultivators of polite literature; who willingly paid that deference to a sage of Greece, they blushed to show for a barbarian dialectician of the thirteenth century. To them at least he was indebted for appearing in a purer text, and in more accurate versions; nor was the criticism of the sixteenth century more employed on any other writer. By the help of philology, as her bounden handmaid, philosophy trimmed afresh her lamp. The true peripatetic system, according to so competent a judge as Buhle, was first made known to the rest of Europe in the sixteenth century; and the new disciples of Aristotle, endeavouring to possess themselves of the spirit, as well as literal sense of his positions, prepared the way for a more advanced generation to poise their weight in the scale of reason.[726]

[726] Buhle, ii. 462.

|Melanchthon countenances him.|

8. The name of Aristotle was sovereign in the continental universities; and the union between his philosophy, or what bore that title, and the church, appeared so long established, that they must stand or fall together. Luther accordingly, in the commencement of the Reformation, inveighed against the Aristotelian logic and metaphysics, or rather against those sciences themselves; nor was Melanchthon at that time much behind him. But time ripened in this, as it did in theology, the disciple’s excellent understanding; and he even obtained influence enough over the master to make him retract some of that invective against philosophy, which at first threatened to bear down all human reason. Melanchthon became a strenuous advocate of Aristotle, in opposition to all other ancient philosophy. He introduced into the university of Wittenberg, to which all protestant Germany looked up, a scheme of dialectics and physics, founded upon the peripatetic school, but improved, as Buhle tells us, by his own acuteness and knowledge. Thus in his books logic is taught with a constant reference to rhetoric; and the physical science of antiquity is enlarged by all that had been added in astronomy and physiology. It need hardly be said, that the authority of Scripture was always resorted to as controlling a philosophy, which had been considered unfavourable to natural religion.[727]

[727] Buhle, ii. 427.

|His own philosophical treatises.|

9. I will not contend, after a very cursory inspection of this work of Melanchthon, against the elaborate panegyric of Buhle; but I cannot think the Initia Doctrinæ Physicæ much calculated to advance the physical sciences. He insists very fully on the influence of the stars in producing events which we call fortuitous, and even in moulding the human character; a prejudice under which this eminent man is well known to have laboured. Melanchthon argues sometimes from the dogmas of Aristotle, sometimes from a literal interpretation of Scripture, so as to arrive at strange conclusions. Another treatise, entitled De Animâ, which I have not seen, is extolled by Buhle as comprehending not only the psychology but the physiology also of man, and as having rendered great service in the age for which it was written. This universality of talents, and we have not yet adverted to the ethics and dialectics of Melanchthon, enhanced his high reputation; nor is it surprising, that the influence of so great a name should have secured the preponderance of the Aristotelian philosophy in the protestant schools of Germany for more than a century.

|Aristotelians of Italy.|

10. The treatise of the most celebrated Aristotelian of his age, Pomponatius, on the immortality of the soul, has been already mentioned. In 1525 he published two books, one on incantations, the other on fate and free will. They are extremely scarce, but, according to the analysis of Brucker, indicate a scheme of philosophy by no means friendly to religion.[728] I do not find any other of the Aristotelian school who falls within the present thirty years, of sufficient celebrity to deserve mention in this place. But the Italian Aristotelians were divided into two classes; one to which Pomponatius belonged, following the interpretation of the ancient Greek scholiasts, especially Alexander of Aphrodisea; the other, that of the famous Spanish philosopher of the twelfth century, Averroes, who may rather be considered an heresiarch in the peripatetic church, than a genuine disciple of its founder. The leading tenet of Averrhoism was the numerical unity of the soul of mankind, notwithstanding its partition among millions of living individuals.[729] This proposition, which it may seem difficult to comprehend, and which Buhle deems a misapprehension of a passage in Aristotle, natural enough to one who read him in a bad Arabic version, is so far worthy of notice, that it contains the germ of an atheistical philosophy, which spread far, as we shall hereafter see, in the latter part of this century, and in the seventeenth.

[728] Brucker, iv. 166.

[729] See Bayle, Averroes, note E, to which I omitted to refer on a former mention of the subject, p. 98.

|University of Paris.|

11. Meantime the most formidable opposition to the authority of Aristotle sprung up in the very centre of his dominions; a conspiracy against the sovereign in his court itself. For, as no university had been equal in renown for scholastic acuteness to that of Paris, there was none so tenacious of its ancient discipline. The very study of Greek and Hebrew was a dangerous innovation in the eyes of its rulers, which they sought to restrain by the intervention of the civil magistrate. Yet here, in their own schools, the ancient routine of dialectics was suddenly disturbed by an audacious hand.

|New logic of Ramus.|

12. Peter Ramus (Ramée) a man of great natural acuteness, an intrepid, though too arrogant a spirit, and a sincere lover of truth, having acquired a considerable knowledge of languages as well as philosophy in the university, where he originally filled, it is said, a menial office in one of the colleges, began publicly to attack the Aristotelian method of logic, by endeavouring to substitute a new system of his own. He had been led to ask himself, he tells us, after three years passed in the study of logic, whether it had rendered him more conversant with facts, more fluent in speech, more quick in poetry, wiser, in short, any way than it had found him; and being compelled to answer all this in the negative, he was put on considering, whether the fault were in himself, or in his course of study. Before he could be quite satisfied as to this question, he fell accidentally upon reading some dialogues of Plato; in which, to his infinite satisfaction, he found a species of logic very unlike the Aristotelian, and far more apt, as it appeared, to the confirmation of truth. From the writings of Plato, and from his own ingenious mind, Ramus framed a scheme of dialectics, which immediately shook the citadel of the Stagyrite; and, though in itself it did not replace the old philosophy, contributed very powerfully to its ultimate decline. The Institutiones Dialecticæ of Ramus were published in 1543.

|It meets with unfair treatment.|

13. In the first instance, however, he met with the strenuous opposition which awaits such innovators. The university laid their complaint before the parliament of Paris; the king took it out of the hands of the parliament, and a singular trial was awarded as to the merits of the rival systems of logic, two judges being nominated by Goveanus, the prominent accuser of Ramus, two by himself, and a fifth by the king. Francis, it seems, though favourable to the classical scholars, whose wishes might generally go against the established dialectics, yet, perhaps, from connecting this innovation with those in religion, took the side of the university; and after a regular hearing, though, as is alleged, a very partial one, the majority of the judges pronouncing an unfavourable decision, Ramus was prohibited from teaching, and his book was suppressed. This prohibition, however, was taken off a few years afterwards, and his popularity as a lecturer in rhetoric gave umbrage to the university. It was not till some time afterwards that his system spread over part of the continent.[730]

[730] Launoy de Variâ Aristot. Fortuna in Acad. Paris. The sixth stage of Aristotle’s fortune, Launoy reckons to be the Ramean controversy, and the victory of the Greek philosopher. He quotes a passage from Omer Talon, which shows that the trial was conducted with much unfairness and violence, p. 112. See also Brucker, v. 548-583, for a copious account of Ramus; and Buhle, ii. 579-602; also Bayle.

|Its merits and character.|

14. Ramus has been once mentioned by Lord Bacon, certainly no bigot to Aristotle, with much contempt, and another time with limited praise.[731] It is however generally admitted by critical historians of philosophy, that he conferred material obligations on science, by decrying the barbarous logic of the schoolmen. What are the merits of his own method, is a different question. It seems evidently to have been more popular and convenient than that in use. He treated logic as merely the art of arguing to others, ars disserendi; and, not unnaturally from this definition, comprehended in it much that the ancients had placed in the province of rhetoric, the invention and disposition of proofs in discourse.

[731] Hooker also says with severe irony: “In the poverty of that other new-devised aid, two things there are notwithstanding singular. Of marvellous quick despatch it is, and doth show them that have it as much almost in three days, as if it had dwelt threescore years with them,” &c. Again: “Because the curiosity of man’s wit doth many times with peril wade farther in the search of things, than were convenient, the same is hereby restrained into such generalities, as everywhere offering themselves, are apparent unto men of the weakest conceit that need be: so as following the rules and precepts thereof, we may find it to be an art, which teacheth the way of speedy discourse, and restraineth the mind of man, that it may not wax over-wise.” Eccles. Pol. i. § 6.

|Buhle’s account of it.|

15. “If we compare,” says Buhle, “the logic of Ramus with that which was previously in use, it is impossible not to recognise its superiority. If we judge of it by comparison with the extent of the science itself and the degree of perfection it has attained in the hands of modern writers, we shall find but an imperfect and faulty attempt.” Ramus neglected, he proceeds to say, the relation of the reason to other faculties of the mind, the sources of error, and the best means of obviating them, the precautions necessary in forming and examining our judgments. His rules display the pedantry of system as much as those of the Aristotelians.[732]

[732] Buhle, ii. 593, 595.

16. As the logic of Ramus appears to be of no more direct utility than that of Aristotle in assisting us to determine the absolute truth of propositions, and consequently could not satisfy Lord Bacon, so perhaps it does not interfere with the proper use of syllogisms, which indeed, on a less extended scale than in Aristotle, form part of the Ramean dialectics. Like all those who assailed the authority of Aristotle, he kept no bounds in depreciating his works; aware perhaps that the public, and especially younger students, will pass more readily from admiration to contempt, than to a qualified estimation, of any famous man.

|Paracelsus.|

17. While Ramus was assaulting the stronghold of Aristotelian despotism, the syllogistic method of argumentation, another province of that extensive empire, its physical theory, was invaded by a still more audacious, and we must add, a much more unworthy innovator, Theophrastus Paracelsus. Though few of this extraordinary person’s writings were published before the middle of the century, yet as he died in 1541, and his disciples began very early to promulgate his theories, we may introduce his name more appropriately in this than in any later period. The system, if so it may be called, of Paracelsus had a primary regard to medicine, which he practised with the boldness of a wandering empiric. It was not unusual in Germany to carry on this profession; and Paracelsus employed his youth in casting nativities, practising chiromancy, and exhibiting chemical tricks. He knew very little Latin, and his writings are as unintelligible from their style as their substance. Yet he was not without acuteness in his own profession; and his knowledge of pharmaceutic chemistry was far beyond that of his age. Upon this real advantage he founded those extravagant theories, which attracted many ardent minds in the sixteenth century, and were afterwards woven into new schemes of fanciful philosophy. His own models were the oriental reveries of the Cabbala, and the theosophy of the mystics. He seized hold of a notion which easily seduces the imagination of those who do not ask for rational proof, that there is a constant analogy between the macrocosm, as they called it, of external nature, and the microcosm of man. This harmony and parallelism of all things, he maintains, can only be made known to us by Divine revelation; and hence all heathen philosophy has been erroneous. The key to the knowledge of nature is in the Scriptures only, studied by means of the Spirit of God communicating an interior light to the contemplative soul. So great an obscurity reigns over the writings of Paracelsus, which, in Latin at least, are not originally his own, for he had but a scanty acquaintance with that language, that it is difficult to pronounce upon his opinions, especially as he affects to use words in senses imposed by himself; the development of his physical system consisted in an accumulation of chemical theorems, none of which are conformable to sound philosophy.[733]

[733] Brucker, iv. 646-684, has copiously descanted on the theosophy of Paracelsus; and a still more enlarged account of it will be found in the third volume of Sprengel’s Geschichte der Arzneykunste, which I use in the French translation. Buhle is very brief in this instance, though he has a general partiality to mystical rhapsodies.

|His impostures.|

18. A mixture of fanaticism and imposture is very palpable in Paracelsus, as in what he calls his Gabalistic art, which produces by imagination and natural faith, “per fidem naturalem ingenitam,” all magical operations, and counterfeits by these means whatever we see in the external world. Man has a sidereal as well as material body, an astral element, which all do not partake in equal degrees; and therefore the power of magic which is in fact the power of astral properties, or of producing those effects which the stars naturally produce, is not equally attainable by all. This astral element of the body survives for a time after death, and explains the apparition of dead persons; but in this state it is subject to those who possess the art of magic, which is then called necromancy.

|And extravagancies.|

19. Paracelsus maintained the animation of everything; all minerals both feed and render their food. And besides this life of every part of nature, it is peopled with spiritual beings, inhabitants of the four elements, subject to disease and death like man. These are the silvains (sylphs), undines, or nymphs, gnomes, and salamanders. It is thus observable that he first gave these names, which rendered afterwards the Rosicrucian fables so celebrated. These live with man, and sometimes, except the salamanders, bear children to him; they know future events and reveal them to us; they are also guardians of hidden treasures, which may be obtained by their means.[734] I may perhaps have said too much about paradoxes so absurd and mendacious; but literature is a garden of weeds as well as flowers; and Paracelsus forms a link in the history of opinion, which should not be overlooked.

[734] Sprengel, iii. 305.

|Cornelius Agrippa.|

20. The sixteenth century was fertile in men, like Paracelsus, full of arrogant pretensions, and eager to substitute their own dogmatism for that they endeavour to overthrow. They are, compared with Aristotle, like the ephemeral demagogues who start up to a power they abuse as well as usurp on the overthrow of some ancient tyranny. One of these was Cornelius Agrippa, chiefly remembered by the legends of his magical skill. Agrippa had drunk deep at the turbid streams of cabbalistic philosophy, which had already intoxicated two men of far greater merit, and born for greater purposes, Picus of Mirandola and Reuchlin. The treatise of Agrippa on occult philosophy is a rhapsody of wild theory and juggling falsehood. It links, however, the theosophy of Paracelsus and the later sect of Behmenists with an oriental lore, venerable in some measure for its antiquity, and full of those aspirations of the soul to break her limits, and withdraw herself from the dominion of sense, which soothed, in old time, the reflecting hours of many a solitary sage on the Ganges and the Oxus. The Jewish doctors had borrowed much from this eastern source, and especially the leading principle of their Cabbala, the emanation of all finite being from the infinite. But this philosophy was in all its successive stages mingled with arbitrary, if not absurd, notions as to angelic and demoniacal intelligences, till it reached a climax in the sixteenth century.

|His pretended philosophy.|

21. Agrippa, evidently the precursor of Paracelsus, builds his pretended philosophy on the four elements, by whose varying forces the phenomena of the world are chiefly produced; yet not altogether, since there are occult forces of greater efficacy than the elementary, and which are derived from the soul of the world, and from the influence of the stars. The mundane spirit actuates every being, but in different degrees, and gives life and form to each; form being derived from the ideas which the Deity has empowered his intelligent ministers, as it were by the use of his seal, to impress. A scale of being, that fundamental theorem of the emanative philosophy, connects the higher and lower orders of things; and hence arises the power of magic; for all things have, by their concatenation, a sympathy with those above and below them, as sound is propagated along a string. But besides these natural relations, which the occult philosophy brings to light, it teaches us also how to propitiate and influence the intelligences, mundane, angelic, or demoniacal, which people the universe. This is best done by fumigations with ingredients corresponding to their respective properties. They may even thus be subdued, and rendered subject to man. The demons are clothed with a material body, and attached to the different elements; they always speak Hebrew, as the oldest tongue.[735] It would be trifling to give one moment’s consideration to this gibberish, were it not evidently connected with superstitious absurdities, that enchained the mind of Europe for some generations. We see the credence in witchcraft and spectral appearances, in astrology and magical charms, in demoniacal possessions, those fruitful springs of infatuation, wretchedness, and crime, sustained by an impudent parade of metaphysical philosophy. The system of Agrippa is the mere creed of magical imposture, on which Paracelsus, and still more Jacob Behmen, grafted a sort of religious mysticism. But in their general influence these theories were still more pernicious than the technical pedantry of the schools. A Venetian monk, Francis Georgius, published a scheme of blended Cabbalistic and Platonic, or Neo-platonic, philosophy, in 1525; but having no collateral pretensions to fame, like some other worshippers of the same phantom, he can only be found in the historians of obsolete paradoxes.[736]

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

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

|His sceptical treatise.|

22. Agrippa has left, among other forgotten productions, a treatise on the uncertainty of the sciences, which served in some measure to promote a sceptical school of philosophy; no very unnatural result of such theories as he had proposed. It is directed against the imperfections sufficiently obvious in most departments of science, but contains nothing which has not been said more ably since that time. It is remarkable that he contradicts much that he had advanced in favour of the occult philosophy, and of the art of Raymond Lully.[737]

[737] Brucker, Buhle.

|Cardan.|

23. A man far superior to both Agrippa and Paracelsus was Jerome Cardan; his genius was quick, versatile, fertile, and almost profound; yet no man can read the strange book on his own life, wherein he describes, or pretends to describe, his extraordinary character, without suspecting a portion of insanity; a suspicion which the hypothesis of wilful falsehood would, considering what the book contains, rather augment than diminish. Cardan’s writings are extremely voluminous; the chief that relate to general philosophy are those entitled De Subtilitate et Varietate Rerum. Brucker praises these for their vast erudition, supported by innumerable experiments and observations on nature, which furnish no trifling collection of facts to readers of judgment; while his incoherence of ideas, his extravagance of fancy, and confused method, have rendered him of little service to philosophy. Cardan professed himself a staunch enemy of Aristotle.[738]

[738] Brucker, v. 85. Cardan had much of the same kind of superstition as Paracelsus and Agrippa. He admits as the basis of his physical philosophy a sympathy between the heavenly bodies and our own; not only general, but distributive: the sun being in harmony with the heart, the moon with the animal juices. All organised bodies he held to be animated, so that there is no principle which may not be called nature. All is ruled by the properties of numbers. Heat and moisture are the only real qualities in nature; the first being the formal, the second the material cause of all things. Sprengel, iii. 278.

SECT. II. 1520-1550.

On Moral and Political Philosophy.

|Influence of moral writers.|

24. By moral philosophy, we are to understand not only systems of ethics, and exhortations to virtue, but that survey of the nature or customs of mankind, which men of reflecting minds are apt to take, and by which they become qualified to guide and advise their fellows. The influence of such men, through the popularity of their writings, is not the same in all periods of society; it has sensibly abated in modern times, and is chiefly exercised through fiction, or at least a more amusing style than was found sufficient for our forefathers; and from this change of fashion, as well as from the advance of real knowledge, and the greater precision of language, many books, once famous, have scarcely retained a place in our libraries, and never lie on our tables.

|Cortegiano of Castiglione.|

25. In this class of literature, good writing, such at least as at the time appears to be good, has always been the condition of public esteem. They form a large portion of the classical prose in every language. And it is chiefly in this point of view that several of the most distinguished can deserve any mention at present. None was more renowned in Italy than the Cortegiano of Castiglione, whose first edition is in 1528. We here find both the gracefulness of the language in this, perhaps its best age, and the rules of polished life in an Italian court. These, indeed, are rather favourably represented, if we compare them with all we know of the state of manners from other sources; but it can be no reproach to the author that he raised the standard of honourable character above the level of practice. The precepts however are somewhat trivial, and the expression diffuse; faults not a little characteristic of his contemporaries. A book that is serious, without depth of thought or warmth of feeling, cannot be read through with pleasure.

26. At some distance below Castiglione in merit, and equally in reputation, we may place the dialogues of Sperone Speroni, a writer whose long life embraced two ages of Italian literature. These dialogues belong to the first, and were published in 1544. Such of them as relate to moral subjects, which he treats more theoretically than Castiglione, are solemn and dry; they contain good sense in good language; but the one has no originality, and the other no spirit.

|Marco Aurelio of Guevara.|

27. A Spanish prelate in the court of Charles obtained an extraordinary reputation in Europe by a treatise so utterly forgotten at present, that Bouterwek has even omitted his name. This was Guevara, author of Marco Aurelio con el Relox de Principes, as the title-page awkwardly runs. It contains several feigned letters of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, which probably in a credulous age passed for genuine, and gave vogue to the book. It was continually reprinted in different languages for more than a century; scarce any book except the Bible, says Casaubon, has been so much translated, or so frequently printed.[739] It must be owned that Guevara is dull; but he wrote in the infancy of Spanish literature. The first part of this book is properly entitled Marco Aurelio, and is filled with the counterfeited letters; the second, Relox de Principes, the Watch or Dial of Princes, is but a farago of trite moral and religious reflections, with an intermixture of classical quotations. It is fair to observe, that Guevara seems uniformly a friend to good and just government, and that he probably employs Roman stories as a screen to his satire on the abuses of his time. Antonio and Bayle censure this as a literary forgery more severely than is quite reasonable. Andrès extols the style very highly.[740]

[739] Bayle speaks of Guevara’s Marco Aurelio with great contempt; its reputation had doubtless much declined before that time.

[740] vii. 148. In 1541, Sir Thomas Elyot published “The Image of Government, compiled of the Acts and Sentences of Alexander Severus,” as the work of Encolpius, an imaginary secretary to that emperor. Some have thought this genuine, or at least no forgery of Elyot’s; but I see little reason to doubt that he imitated Guevara. Fabric. Bibl. Lat. and Herbert.

|His Menosprecio di Corte.|

28. Guevara wrote better, or more pleasingly, in some other moral essays. One of them Menosprecio di Corte y Alabanza d’Aldea, indifferently translated into English by Thomas Tymme in 1575, contains some eloquent passages; and being dictated apparently by his own feelings, instead of the spirit of book-making, is far superior to the more renowned Marco Aurelio. Antonio blames Guevara for affectation of antithesis, and too studious desire to say everything well. But this sententious and antithetical style of the Spanish writers is worthy of our attention; for it was imitated by their English admirers, and formed a style much in vogue in the reigns of Elizabeth and James. Thus, to take a very short specimen from Tymme’s translation: “In the court,” says Guevara, “it profits little to be wise, forasmuch as good service is soon forgotten, friends soon fail and enemies augment, the nobility doth forget itself, science is forgotten, humility despised, truth cloaked and hid, and good counsel refused.” This elaborately condensed antithetical manner cannot have been borrowed from the Italians, of whom it is by no means a distinguishing feature.

|Perez d’Oliva.|

29. Bouterwek has taken notice of a moral writer contemporary with Guevara, though not so successful in his own age, Perez d’Oliva. Of him, Andrès says, that the slight specimen he has left in his dialogue on the dignity of man, displays the elegance, politeness, and vigour of his style. It is written, says Bouterwek, in a natural and easy manner; the ideas are for the most part clearly and accurately developed, and the oratorical language, particularly where it is appropriately introduced, is powerful and picturesque.[741]

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

|Ethical writings of Erasmus and Melanchthon.|

30. The writings of Erasmus are very much dedicated to the inculcation of Christian ethics. The Enchiridion Militis Christiani, the Lingua, and, above all, the Colloquies, which have this primary object in view, may be distinguished from the rest. The Colloquies are, from their nature, the most sportive and amusing of his works; the language of Erasmus has no prudery; nor his moral code, though strict, any austerity; it is needless to add, that his piety has no superstition. The dialogue is short and pointed, the characters display themselves naturally, the ridicule falls, in general, with skill and delicacy; the moral is not forced, yet always in view; the manners of the age, in some of the Colloquies, as in the German Inn, are humorously and agreeably represented. Erasmus, perhaps, in later times, would have been successful as a comic writer. The works of Vives breathe an equally pure spirit of morality. But it is unnecessary to specify works of this class, which, valuable as they are in their tendency, form too much the staple literature of every generation to be enumerated in its history. The treatise of Melanchthon, Moralis Philosophiæ Epitome, stands on different grounds. It is a compendious system of ethics, built in great measure on that of Aristotle, but with such variation as the principles of Christianity, or his own judgment, led him to introduce. Hence, though he exhorts young students, as the result of his own long reflection on the subject, to embrace the Peripatetic theory of morals, in preference of those of the Stoic or Epicurean school,[742] and contends for the utility of moral philosophy, as part of the law of God, and the exposition of that of nature, he admits that the reason is too weak to discern the necessity of perfect obedience, or the sinfulness of natural appetite.[743] In this epitome, which is far from servilely following the Aristotelian dogmas, he declares wholly against usury, less wise in this than Calvin, and asserts the magistrate’s right to punish heretics.

[742] Ego vero qui has sectarum controversias diu multumque agitavi, ἄνω καὶ κάτω στρέφων [anô kai katô strephôn], ut Plato facere præcipit, valde adhortor adolescentulos, ut repudiatis Stoicis et Epicureis, amplectantur Peripatetica. Præfat. ad. Mor. Philos. Epist. (1549).

[743] Id. p. 4. The following passage, taken nearly at random, may serve as a fair specimen of Melanchthon’s style:

Primum cum necesse sit legem Dei, item magistratuum leges nosse, ut disciplinam teneamus ad coercendas cupiditates, facile intelligi potest, hanc philosophiam etiam prodesse, quæ est quædam domestica disciplina, quæ cum demonstrat fontes et causas virtutum, accendit animos ad earum amorem; abeunt enim studia in mores, atque hoc magis invitantur animi, quia quo propius aspicimus res bonas, eo magis ipsas et admiramur et amamus. Hic autem perfecta notitia virtutis quæritur. Neque vero dubium est, quin, ut Plato ait, sapientia, si quod ejus simulacrum manifestum in oculos incurreret, acerrimos amores excitaret. Nulla autem fingi effigies potest, quæ propius exprimat virtutem et clarius ob oculos ponat spectantibus, quam hæc doctrina. Quare ejus tractatio magnam vim habet ad excitandos animos, ad amorem rerum honestarum, præsertim in bonis ac mediocribus ingeniis, p. 6.

He tacitly retracts in this treatise all he had said against free will in the first edition of the Loci Communes; in hac quæstione moderatio adhibenda est, ne quas amplectamur opiniones immoderatas in utramque partem, quæ aut moribus officiant, aut beneficia Christi obscurent, p. 34.

|Sir T. Elyot’s Governor.|

31. Sir Thomas Elyot’s Governor, published in 1531, though it might also find a place in the history of political philosophy, or of classical literature, seems best to fall under this head; education of youth being certainly no insignificant province of moral science. The author was a gentleman of good family, and had been employed by the king in several embassies. The Biographia Britannica pronounces him “an excellent grammarian, poet, rhetorician, philosopher, physician, cosmographer, and historian.” For some part of this sweeping eulogy we have no evidence; but it is a high praise to have been one of our earliest English writers of worth, and though much inferior in genius to Sir Thomas More, equal perhaps in learning and sagacity to any scholar of the age of Henry VIII. The plan of Sir Thomas Elyot in his Governor, as laid down in his dedication to the king, is bold enough. It is “to describe in our vulgar tongue the form of a just public weal, which matter I have gathered as well of the sayings of most noble authors, Greek and Latin, as by mine own experience, I being continually pained in some daily affairs of the public weal of this most noble realm almost from my childhood.” But it is far from answering to this promise. After a few pages on the superiority of regal over every other government, he passes to the subject of education, not of a prince only, but any gentleman’s son, with which he fills up the rest of his first book.

|Severity of education.|

32. This contains several things worthy of observation. He advises that children be used to speak Latin from their infancy, and either learn Latin and Greek together, or begin with Greek. Elyot deprecates “cruel and yrous schoolmasters, by whom the wits of children be dulled, whereof we need no better author to witness, than daily experience.”[744] All testimonies concur to this savage ill-treatment of boys in the schools of this period. The fierceness of the Tudor government, the religious intolerance, the polemical brutality, the rigorous justice, when justice it was, of our laws, seem to have engendered a hardness of character, which displayed itself in severity of discipline, when it did not even reach the point of arbitrary or malignant cruelty. Every one knows the behaviour of Lady Jane Grey’s parents towards their accomplished and admirable child; the slave of their temper in her brief life, the victim of their ambition in death. The story told by Erasmus of Colet is also a little too trite for repetition. The general fact is indubitable; and I think we may ascribe much of the hypocrisy and disingenuousness, which became almost national characteristics in this and the first part of the next century, to the rigid scheme of domestic discipline so frequently adopted; though I will not say but that we owe some part of the firmness and power of self-command, which were equally manifest in the English character, to the same cause.

[744] Chap. x.

|He seems to avoid politics.|

33. Elyot dwells much and justly on the importance of elegant arts, such as music, drawing, and carving, by which he means sculpture, and of manly exercises, in liberal education; and objects with reason to the usual practice of turning mere boys at fifteen to the study of the laws.[745] In the second book he seems to come back to his original subject, by proposing to consider what qualities a governor ought to possess. But this soon turns to long commonplace ethics, copiously illustrated out of ancient history, but perhaps, in general, little more applicable to kings than to private men, at least those of superior station. It is plain that Elyot did not venture to handle the political part of his subject as he wished to do. He seems worthy, upon the whole, on account of the solidity of his reflections, to hold a higher place than Ascham, to whom, in some respects, he bears a good deal of resemblance.

[745] Chap. xiv.

|Nicholas Machiavel.|

34. Political philosophy was not yet a common theme with the writers of Europe, unless so far as the moral duties of princes may have been vaguely touched by Guevara or Elyot, or their faults strongly, but incidentally adverted to by Erasmus and More. One great luminary, however, appeared at this time, though, as he has been usually deemed, rather a sinister meteor than a benignant star. It is easy to anticipate the name of Nicolas Machiavel. His writings are posthumous, and were first published at Rome early in 1532, with an approbation of the pope. It is certain, however, that the treatise called The Prince was written in 1513, and the Discourses on Livy about the same time.[746] Few are ignorant that Machiavel filled for nearly fifteen years the post of secretary to that government of Florence which was established between the expulsion of the Medici in 1494 and their return in 1512. This was in fact the remnant of the ancient oligarchy, which had yielded to the ability and popular influence of Cosmo and Lorenzo de’ Medici. Machiavel, having served this party, over which the gonfalonier Pietro Soderini latterly presided, with great talents and activity, was naturally involved in their ruin; and having undergone imprisonment and torture on a charge of conspiracy against the new government, was living in retired poverty when he set himself down to the composition of his two political treatises. The strange theories, that have been brought forward to account for The Prince of Machiavel, could never be revived after the publication of Ginguéné’s history of Italian literature, and the article on Machiavel in the Biographie Universelle, if men had not sometimes a perverse pleasure in seeking refinements, after the simple truth has been laid before them.[747] His own language may assure us of what surely is not very improbable, that his object was to be employed in the service of Julian de’ Medici, who was at the head of the state in Florence, almost in the situation of a prince, though without the title; and that he wrote this treatise to recommend himself in his eyes. He had been faithful to the late powers; but these powers were dissolved; and in a republic, a dissolved government, itself the recent creature of force and accident, being destitute of the prejudice in favour of legitimacy, could have little chance of reviving again. It is probable, from the general tenor of Machiavel’s writings, that he would rather have lived under a republic than under a prince; but the choice was not left; and it was better, in his judgment, to serve a master usefully for the state, than to waste his life in poverty and insignificance.

[746] There are mutual references in each of these books to the other, from which Ginguéné has reasonably inferred that they were in progress at the same time. Hist. Litt. de l’Italie, viii. 46.

[747] Ginguéné has taken great pains with his account of Machiavel, and I do not know that there is a better. The Biographie Universelle has a good anonymous article. Tiraboschi had treated the subject in a most slovenly manner.

|His motives in writing The Prince.|

35. We may also in candour give Machiavel credit for sincerity in that animated exhortation to Julian which concludes the last chapter of The Prince, where he calls him forth to the noble enterprise of rescuing Italy from the barbarians. Twenty years that beautiful land had been the victim of foreign armies, before whom in succession every native state had been humiliated or overthrown. His acute mind easily perceived that no republican institution would possess stability or concert enough to cast off this yoke. He formed therefore the idea of a prince; one raised newly to power, for Italy furnished no hereditary line; one sustained by a native army, for he deprecates the employment of mercenaries; one loved, but feared also, by the many; one to whom, in so magnanimous an undertaking as the liberation of Italy, all her cities would render a willing obedience. It might be, in part, a strain of flattery, in which he points out to Julian of Medici a prospect so disproportionate, as we know historically, to his opportunities and his character; yet it was one also perhaps of sanguine fancy and unfeigned hope.

|Some of his rules not immoral.|

36. None of the explanations assigned for the motives of Machiavel in The Prince is more groundless than one very early suggested, that by putting the house of Medici on schemes of tyranny, he was artfully luring them to their ruin. Whether this could be reckoned an excuse, may be left to the reader; but we may confidently affirm that it contradicts the whole tenor of that treatise. And, without palliating the worst passages, it may be said that few books have been more misrepresented. It is very far from true, that he advises a tyrannical administration of government, or one likely to excite general resistance, even to those whom he thought, or rather knew from experience, to be placed in the most difficult position for retaining power, by having recently been exalted to it. The Prince, he repeatedly says, must avoid all that will render him despicable or odious, especially injury to the property of citizens, or to their honour.[748] This will leave him nothing to guard against but the ambition of a few. Conspiracies, which are of little importance while the people are well affected, become unspeakably dangerous as soon as they are hostile.[749] Their love, therefore, or at least the absence of their hatred, is the basis of the governor’s security, and far better than any fortresses.[750] A wise prince will honour the nobility, at the same time that he gives content to the people.[751] If the observance of these maxims is likely to subvert a ruler’s power, he may be presumed to have designed the ruin of the Medici. The first duke in the new dynasty of that house, Cosmo I., lived forty years in the practice of all Machiavel would have advised, for evil as well as good; and his reign was not insecure.

[748] c. xvii. and xix.

[749] c. xix.

[750] c. xx. la miglior fortezza che sia è non essere odiato de’ popoli.

[751] c. xix.

|But many dangerous.|

37. But much of a darker taint is found in The Prince. Good faith, justice, clemency, religion, should be ever in the mouth of the ideal ruler; but he must learn not to fear the discredit of any actions which he finds necessary to preserve his power.[752] In a new government, it is impossible to avoid the charge of cruelty; for new states are always exposed to dangers. Such cruelties perpetrated at the outset and from necessity, “if we may be permitted to speak well of what is evil,” may be useful; though when they become habitual and unnecessary, they are incompatible with the continuance of this species of power.[753] It is best to be both loved and feared; but if a choice must be made, it should be of the latter. For men are naturally ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, cowardly, and will promise much to a benefactor, but desert him in his need, and will break the bonds of love much sooner than those of fear. But fear does not imply hatred; nor need a prince apprehend that, while he abstains from the properties and the wives of his subjects. Occasions to take the property of others never cease, while those of shedding blood are rare; and besides, a man will sooner forgive the death of his father, than the loss of his inheritance.[754]

[752] c. xvi., xviii.

[753] c. viii.

[754] c. xvii.

|Its only palliation.|

38. The eighteenth chapter, on the manner in which princes should observe faith, might pass for a satire on their usual violations of it, if the author did not too seriously manifest his approbation of them. The best palliation of this, and of what else has been justly censured in Machiavel, is to be derived from his life and times. These led him to consider every petty government as in a continual state of self-defence against treachery and violence, from its ill-affected citizens, as well as from its ambitious neighbours. It is very difficult to draw the straight line of natural right in such circumstances; and neither perhaps the cool reader of a remote age, nor the secure subject of a well-organised community, is altogether a fair arbiter of what has been done or counselled in days of peril and necessity; relatively, I mean, to the persons, not to the objective character of actions. There is certainly a steadiness of moral principle and Christian endurance, which tells us that it is better not to exist at all, than to exist at the price of virtue; but few indeed of the countrymen and contemporaries of Machiavel had any claim to the practice, whatever they might have to the profession, of such integrity. His crime, in the eyes of the world, and it was truly a crime, was to have cast away the veil of hypocrisy, the profession of a religious adherence to maxims which at the same moment were violated.[755]

[755] Morhof has observed that all the arts of tyranny which we read in Machiavel, had been unfolded by Aristotle; and Ginguéné has shown this in some measure from the eleventh chapter of the fifth book of the latter’s politics. He might also have quoted the Œconomics; the second book, however, of which, full of the stratagems and frauds of Dionysius, though nearly of his age, is not genuine. Mitford, with his usual partiality to tyrants (chap. xxxi. sect. 8), seems to think them all laudable.

|His discourses on Livy.|

39. The Discourses of Machiavel upon the first books of Livy, though not more celebrated than The Prince, have been better esteemed. Far from being exempt from the same bias in favour of unscrupulous politics, they abound with similar maxims, especially in the third book; but they contain more sound and deep thinking on the spirit of small republics, than could be found in any preceding writer that has descended to us; more probably, in a practical sense, than the Politics of Aristotle, though they are not so comprehensive. In reasoning upon the Roman government, he is naturally sometimes misled by confidence in Livy; but his own acquaintance with modern Italy was in some measure the corrective that secured him from the errors of ordinary antiquaries.

|Their leading principles.|

40. These discourses are divided into three books, and contain 143 chapters with no great regard to arrangement; written probably as reflections occasionally presented themselves to the author’s mind. They are built upon one predominant idea; that the political and military annals of early Rome having had their counterparts in a great variety of parallel instances which the recent history of Italy furnished, it is safe to draw experimental principles from them, and to expect the recurrence of similar consequences in the same circumstances. This reasoning, founded upon a single repetition of the event, though it may easily mislead us, from an imperfect estimate of the conditions, and does not give a high probability to our anticipations, is such as those intrusted with the safety of commonwealths ought not to neglect. But Machiavel sprinkles these discourses with thoughts of a more general cast, and often applies a comprehensive knowledge of history, and a long experience of mankind.

41. Permanence, according to Machiavel, is the great aim of government.[756] In this very common sentiment among writers accustomed to republican forms, although experience of the mischiefs generally attending upon change might lead to it, there is, no doubt, a little of Machiavel’s original taint, the reference of political ends to the benefit of the rulers rather than that of the community. But the polity which he seems for the most part to prefer, though he does not speak explicitly, nor always perhaps consistently, is one wherein the people should at least have great weight. In one passage he recommends, like Cicero and Tacitus, the triple form, which endeavours to conciliate the power of a prince with that of a nobility and a popular assembly; as the best means of preventing that cycle of revolutions through which, as he supposes, the simpler institutions would naturally, if not necessarily, pass; from monarchy to aristocracy, from that to democracy, and finally to monarchy again; though, as he observes, it rarely happens that there is time given to complete this cycle, which requires a long course of ages, the community itself, as an independent state, being generally destroyed before the close of the period.[757] But, with his predilection for a republican polity, he yet saw its essential weakness in difficult circumstances; and hence observes that there is no surer way to ruin a democracy than to set it on bold undertakings, which it is sure to misconduct.[758] He has made also the profound and important remark, that states are rarely either formed, or reformed, except by one man.[759]

[756] l. i. c. 2.

[757] c. 2 and 6.

[758] c. 53.

[759] c. 9. Corniani, iv. 70, has attempted to reduce into system the Discourses of Machiavel, which have no regular arrangement, so that nearly the same thoughts recur in different chapters.

|Their use and influence.|

42. Few political treatises can even now be read with more advantage than the Discourses of Machiavel; and in proportion as the course of civil society tends farther towards democracy, and especially if it should lead to what seems the inevitable consequence of democracy, a considerable subdivision of independent states, they may acquire an additional value. The absence of all passion, the continual reference of every public measure to a distinct end, the disregard of vulgar associations with names or persons, render him, though too cold of heart for a very generous reader, a sagacious and useful monitor for any one who can employ the necessary methods of correcting his theorems. He formed a school of subtle reasoners upon political history, which, both in Italy and France, was in vogue for two centuries; and, whatever might be its errors, has hardly been superseded for the better by the loose declamation that some dignify with the name of philosophical politics, and in which we continually find a more flagitious and undisguised abandonment of moral rules for the sake of some idol of a general principle, than can be imputed to The Prince of Machiavel.

|His History of Florence.|

43. Besides these two works, the History of Florence is enough to immortalise the name of Nicolas Machiavel. Seldom has a more giant stride been made in any department of literature, than by this judicious, clear, and elegant history: for the preceding historical works, whether in Italy or out of it, had no claims to the praise of classical composition, while this has ranked among the greatest of that order. Machiavel was the first who gave at once a general and a luminous development of great events in their causes and connections, such as we find in the first book of his History of Florence. That view of the formation of European societies, both civil and ecclesiastical, on the ruins of the Roman empire, though it may seem now to contain only what is familiar, had never been attempted before, and is still, for its conciseness and truth, as good as any that can be read.

|Treatises on Venetian government.|

44. The little treatises of Giannotti and Contarini on the republic of Venice, being chiefly descriptive of actual institutions, though the former, a Florentine by birth, sometimes reasons upon and even censures them, would not deserve notice, except as they display an attention to the workings of a most complicated, and at the same time a most successful machine. The wonderful permanency, tranquillity, and prosperity of Venice became the admiration of Europe, and especially, as was most natural, of Italy; where she stood alone, without internal usurpation or foreign interference, strong in wisdom more than in arms, the survivor of many lines of petty princes, and many revolutions of turbulent democracy, which had, on either side of the Apennine, run their race of guilt and sorrow for several preceding centuries.[760]

[760] These are both published in Grævius, Thesaur. Antiq. Italiæ. See too Ginguéné, viii. 186.

|Calvin’s political principles.|

45. Calvin alone, of the reformers in this period, has touched upon political government as a theme of rational discussion; though he admits that it is needless to dispute which is the best form of polity, since private men have not the right of altering that under which they live. The change from monarchy to despotism, he says, is easy; nor, is that from aristocracy to the dominion of a few much more difficult; but nothing is so apt to follow as sedition from a popular regimen. But upon the whole he considers an aristocratic form to be far better than the other two, on account of the vices and infirmity of human nature.[761]

[761] Calv. Inst. l. iv. c. 20, § 8.

SECT. III. 1501-1510.

Jurisprudence.

|Jurisprudence confined to Roman law.|

46. Under the name of jurisprudence, we are not yet to seek for writings on that high department of moral philosophy, which treats of the rules of universal justice, by which positive legislation and the courts of judicature ought to be directed. Whatever of this kind may appear in works of this period, arises incidentally out of their subject, and does not constitute their essence. According to the primary and established sense of the word, especially on the Continent, jurisprudence is the science of the Roman law, and is seldom applied to any other positive system, but least of all to the law of nature. Yet the application of this study has been too extensive in Europe, and the renown of its chief writers too high, to admit of our passing wholly over this department of literature, as we do some technical and professional subjects.

|The laws not well arranged.|

47. The civil or Roman law is comprehended in four leading divisions (besides some later than the time of Justinian), very unequal in length, but altogether forming that multifarious collection usually styled the Corpus Juris Civilis. As this has sometimes been published in a single, though a vast and closely printed volume, it may seem extraordinary, that by means of arranged indexes, marginal references, and similar resources, it was not, soon after it came into use as a standard authority, or, at least, soon after the invention of printing, reduced into a less disorderly state than its present disposition exhibits. But the labours of the oldest jurists, in accumulating glosses or short marginal interpretations, were more calculated to multiply than to disentangle the intricacies of the Pandects.

|Adoption of the entire system.|

48. It is at first sight more wonderful, that many nations of Europe, instead of selecting the most valuable portion of the civil law, as directory to their own tribunals, should have bestowed decisive authority on that entire unwieldy body which bore the name of Justinian; laws, which they could not understand, and which, in great measure, must, if understood, have been perceived to clash with the new order of human society. But the homage paid to the Roman name, the previous reception of the Theodosian code in the same countries, the vague notion of the Italians, artfully encouraged by one party, that the Conrads and Frederics were really successors of the Theodosii and Justinians, the frequent clearness, acuteness, and reasonableness of the decisions of the old lawyers which fill the Pandects, the immense difficulty of separating the less useful portion, and of obtaining public authority for a new system, the deference, above all, to great names, which cramped every effort of the human mind in the middle ages, will sufficiently account for the adoption of a jurisprudence so complicated, uncertain, unintelligible, and ill-fitted to the times.

|Utility of general learning to lawyers.|

49. The portentous ignorance of the earlier jurists in everything that could aid their textual explanations has been noticed in the first chapter of this volume. This could not hold out long after the revival of learning. Budæus, in his Observations on the Pandects, was the first to furnish better verbal interpretations; but his philological erudition was not sustained by that knowledge of the laws themselves which nothing but long labour could impart.[762] Such a knowledge of the Latin language as even after the revival of letters was given in the schools, or we may add, as is now obtained by those who are counted learned among us, serves but little towards the understanding those Roman lawyers, whose short decisions, or, as we should call them, opinions, occupy the fifty books of the Pandects. They had not only a technical terminology, as is perhaps necessary in professional usage, but many words and phrases not merely technical occur, as to the names and notions of things, which the classical authors, especially such as are commonly read, do not contain. Yet these writers of antiquity, when diligently pursued, throw much light upon jurisprudence; they assist conjecture, if they do not afford proof, as to the meaning of words; they explain allusions, they connect the laws with their temporary causes or general principles; and if they seem a little to lead us astray from the great object of jurisprudence, the adjudication of right, it was still highly important, in the conditions that Europe had imposed upon herself, to ascertain what it was that she had chosen to obey.

[762] Gravina, Origines Jur. Civ. p. 211.

|Alciati; his reform of law.|

50. Ulric Zasias, a professor at Friburg, and Garcia d’Erzilla, whose commentaries were printed in 1515, should have the credit, according to Andrès, of leading the way to a more elegant jurisprudence.[763] The former of these is known, in some measure, as a scholar and a correspondent of Erasmus; for the latter I have to depend on the testimony of his countrymen. But the general voice of Europe has always named Andrew Alciati of Milan as the restorer of the Roman law. He taught, from the year 1518 to his death in 1550, in the universities of Avignon, Milan, Bourges, Paris, and Bologna. Literature became with him the handmaid of law; the historians of Rome, her antiquaries, her orators and poets, were called upon to elucidate the obsolete words and obscure allusions of the Pandects; to which, the earlier as well as the most valuable and extensive portion of the civil law, this method of classical interpretation is chiefly applicable. Alciati had another advantage, denied to his predecessors of the middle ages, in the possession of the Byzantine jurists, with whom, says Gravina, the learning of Roman law had been preserved in a more perfect state amidst other vestiges of the empire, and while almost extinguished in Italy by the barbarians, had been in daily usage at Constantinople down to its capture. Alciati was the first who taught the lawyers to write with purity and elegance. Erasmus has applied to him the eulogy of Cicero on Scævola, that he was the most jurisprudent of orators, and the most eloquent of lawyers. But he deserved also the higher praise of sweeping away the rubbish of conflicting glosses, which had so confounded the students by their contrary subtilties, that it had become a practice to count, instead of weighing, their authorities. It has been regretted that he made little use of philosophy in the exposition of law; but this could not have been attempted in the sixteenth century without the utmost danger of misleading the interpreter.[764]

[763] Andrès, xvi. 143. Savigny agrees with Andrès as to the merits of Zasius, and observes that the revival of the study of the laws in their original sources, instead of the commentators, had been announced by several signs before the sixteenth century. Ambrogio Traversari had recommended this, and Lebrixa wrote against the errors of Accursius, though in a superficial manner. Gesch. des Römischen Rechts, vi. 364.

[764] Bayle, art. Alciati. Gravina, p. 206. Tiraboschi, ix. 115. Corniani, v. 57.

|Opposition to him.|

|Agustino.|

51. The practical lawyers, whose prejudices were nourished by their interests, conspired with the professors of the old school to clamour against the introduction of literature into jurisprudence. Alciati was driven sometimes from one university to another by their opposition; but more frequently his restless disposition and his notorious desire of gain were the causes of his migrations. They were the means of diffusing a more liberal course of studies in France as well as Italy, and especially in the great legal university of Bourges. He stood not however alone in scattering the flowers of polite literature over the thorny brakes of jurisprudence. An eminent Spaniard, Antonio Agustino, might perhaps be placed almost on a level with him. The first work of Agustino, Emendationes Juris Civilis, was published in 1544. Andrès, seldom deficient in praising his compatriots, pronounces such an eulogy on the writings of Agustino, as to find no one but Cujacius worthy of being accounted his equal, if indeed he does not give the preference in genius and learning to the older writer.[765] Gravina is less diffusely panegyrical; and in fact it is certain that Agustino, though a lawyer of great erudition and intelligence, has been eclipsed by those for whom he prepared the way.

[765] Vol. xvi. p. 148.

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