I. riors. But their triumphs were the destruction of CHAP. their religion; and it became necessary to discipline Christianity, by the introduction of Mahomedanism, DECLINE in order to preserve it. OF LITERA TURE BE i NORMAN Pursuing these considerations to their conse- FORE THE quences, we cannot wonder that the Grecian literature had declined into insignificance in the ninth and tenth centuries.55 It is certainly a remarkable fact, that both the Grecian and the Roman literature were unable to sustain themselves. They not only became incompetent to improve the world-they could not even continue their own existence. They neither corrected their evil tendencies, nor those of society, nor preserved their real merit. They became neglected and discredited in their own countries, where they had once so vigorously flourished; and when the barbarous nations attempted to transplant them into the Gothic soil, they produced but a feeble vegetation, which soon hastened into decay." 55 In the ninth century, Bardas began to open schools of good letters in Constantinople. Curopalates says of him, that he had a knowlege of foreign wisdom, which had long declined, and had almost wholly ́ perished. There was then so great a penury of learned inen in Greece, that it was necessary to search them out with great diligence, living concealed here and there in corners, and in want. There was no vestige of schools in Athens at that time.' Baronius Annal. 1. p. 180. Yet no barbarians had then occupied the Byzantine capital. 56 Great lamentation has been made at the loss of so many of the Greek poets, and great indignation excited by the account which P. Alcyonio, in his Lib. de Exilio, has transmitted to us, that the eastern emperors, under the influence of the Grecian clergy, caused many of their ancient Greek poems to be burnt. Among these he particularizes those of Menander, Diphilus, Apollodorus, Philemon, Alexis, Sappho, Grinna, Anacreon, Minnermus, Bion, Alcman, and Alcæus. But the same author expresses the reason to have been on account of their indecencies. We need not therefore refer their perishing to any imperial destruction; because in every country, as its moral taste and judgment improves, all writers of this sort sink naturally into that disuse and oblivion, which our indecent poets and novelists of Charles II. have experienced, and which the similar ones of our own time must submit to. The preservation of such works, especially in a dead language, could BOOK HISTORY OF It is manifest that by the time the Gothic tribes overthrew the Roman empire, that sensitive rectitude LITERARY of intellect or refinement of judgment, which we call ENGLAND. good taste, had abandoned the Roman mind. This invaluable attainment of the cultivated spirit seems to depend neither on rank nor on government; for the low born Horace and Virgil, under the military despotism of Augustus, possessed it in a degree superior to any of the ancients-not, perhaps, even excepting Cicero and Livy. Its deficiency in every subsequent generation appeared not only in literary composition, but also in the fine arts. The glaring superseded the tasteful; colour took the lead of beauty; the monstrous had displaced the natural; and the perfect art of ancient painting seemed to have expired; showy purple wandered about the walls, and the drugs of India lavishly stained them; but no noble picture 58 delighted the eye of feeling and the cultivated reason. Moral, not political causes, must have produced this deterioration; and the ancients seem to hint at this idea; for Pliny reminds us, that the great Protogenes was contented 57 have produced no good to mankind. Hence, tho Aristophanes was so celebrated for his attic style, yet as its peculiar graces can be but faintly perceived by modern students, his works, if familiarly used, would do far more injury by their frequent licentiousness than they would benefit by their diction. The world is always outgrowing such sort of compositions, and from its own improvement, as well as for its own happiness, neglects them. It is probable that the most useful and least exceptionable of the ancient classics have survived to us. These benefit mankind as far as their utility extends; but it is obvious that if the mind of the world was to be now confined to them, it would fall from its present varied affluence to a state of great comparative poverty. 57 See Vitruvius, l. 7. c. 5. This bad taste was beginning in the days of Tully, for he remarks how much floridiora' the new pictures were than the old ones; how much less durably they pleased, and how horrid such an effect would have been deemed in those of the ancient masters. De Nat. 1. 3. c. 25. Nunc et purpuris in parietes migran 58 Pliny Nat. Hist. 1. 35. c. 7. 59 I. OF LITERA- NORMAN with a cottage in his garden, and that a pictorial CHAP. artist was then the common property of the world." While Petronius desires us not to be surprised that DECLINE painting had declined, because in his days a heap of gold was thought to be far more beautiful than any FORE THE thing which Apelles, Phidias, or any such insignifi- CONQUEST. cant madmen; had created. Neither art nor literature lost any thing by the Roman mind being changed for the Gothic; the same interval of time was necessary for the transplanted seed and engrafted buds to grow up to their full beauty in the latter. 60 Let us now contemplate the revival of classical literature in England, and its intellectual result. This will enable us more completely to ascertain its value; and to mark the utility of the new direction and occupations in which the English and European mind was after the Norman conquest eagerly engaged. 59 Nat. Hist. 1. 35. c. 10. 60 Petr. Satyr. c. 87. How much the love, the pursuit, and the possession of wealth corrupted the human mind, its history after the conquest of Asia fully shews. How different were their forefathers, and how poor! Even Petronius felt the ill effects of the fashionable luxury of Rome on the mind to be so great, as to say, that he who loves the results of superior art, and would apply his mind to great things, must, like the ancients, study under the habits of a strict frugality, and avoid palaces, suppers, wine, and public theatres; with philosophy he should associate, and exercise himself with the arms of the mighty Demosthenes; then the grand elocution of the unconquered Cicero will be his own; his mind will be full of the stream of genius, and he will pour out his own conceptions from a Pierian breast.' 1. 1. Latin of the CHA P. II. History of the Revival of the Latin Literature in England, after the Norman Conquest. BOOK THE first literature that arose in England, after the VI. Saxon invasion, was the Roman; introduced the monks, whom Gregory the Great had sent from Italy. A little Greek was added by one of them,' but it did not lead to the permanent cultivation of Greek literature. The books that were placed and studied in the Anglo-Saxon libraries, were, the Roman classics and fathers; and the works of the few Anglo-Saxon students who emerged into celebrity, were little else than transcripts, imitations, and revivals of that species of literature which had fallen with the Western empire, and whose fragments were afterwards sought after and collected by its barbaric conquerors. Its decline. When Alfred endeavored to direct his countrymen to intellectual cultivation, it was the Roman literature which he presented to their contemplation, in his translations of Boetius and Orosius; and even in Gregory and Bede, who were little else than the Latin fathers reflected and unimproved, except so far as their facts and reasoning were selected from their rhetoric, of which our Bede did not retain, and does 1 Bede, 1. 4. c. 1. The Anglo-Saxon mode of pronouncing the Lord's Prayer in Greek, as given in Hist. Anglo-Sax. v. 2. p. 361, from a Saxon MS. shows how little the Greek was understood; the words are divided so as to prove that they were repeated by mere parrots, as sounds, the verbal meaning of which was not known. 2 See the list in Hist. Anglo-Sax. v. 2. pp. 362, 363. II. LITERA TURE AFTER THE NORMAN not exhibit to us a single ray. This species of letters CHAP. After did not advance the Anglo-Saxon mind. Alfred's death, it rapidly declined. Dunstan and his REVIVAL friends endeavored to revive it, with its rhetorical OF LATIN costume, but in vain. England became under its tuition, a degenerating people. The Anglo-Saxon vernacular literature could give no intellectual suc- CONQUEST. cor; for it was of little value, and was never improved and at the period of the Norman conquest, all sort of learning had almost vanished out of our Island. Such was the state of its most intellectual body, the ecclesiastic, that we find it declared that "the studies of learning and religion had become obsolete; the clergy, contented with a disorderly literature, could scarcely stammer out the words of their sacraments; it was a miracle to the rest if any of them knew grammar." "3 The Anglo-Saxon monks are described to have been stupid and barbarous, living like the laity; following hounds and falcons, racing with horses, shaking the dice, and indulging bacchanalian jovialities where they had the means, and in other places, existing in the most sordid poverty. Even the archbishop and bishops, in the time of the Confessor, are noticed to have been illiterate and sensual men. And thus the Roman literature was found to be as ineffective to general improvement in England, as it had been in Italy. Tho transplanted among a new people, and patronized by a popular king and a venerated prelate, it never displayed a vigorous or an extensive produce; the national 6 4 Ib. pp. 214. 254. 4 * Malmsb. 1. 3. p. 101. Thus in the cathedral of Rochester, there were scarcely four canons, and these had, to endure life with a scanty food, casually obtained from meal to meal.' Ib. p. 233. Ib. 204. 256. |