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LECTURE IX.

REFORMATION.

THE subjects to which we adverted in the course of the last lecture would be found, if examined, immediately to introduce us to others of such general importance that the particular histories of the different States of Europe can now no longer be separately surveyed.

These new subjects of such general and extraordinary importance are the Revival of Learning and the Reformation.

For the present, therefore, we must leave these particular histories of England, of France and Germany, and endeavour to familiarise the student to those general remarks which constitute the philosophy of history, and above all, to induce him to fix his view very earnestly on the events I have just mentioned, the greatest of modern history, the revival of learning and the Reformation.

A few preliminary observations may, however, be suggested to you. In the course of your reading, as you come down from the history of the Middle Ages, you will be brought down to the history of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and this era, you will perceive, was the era of inventions and discoveries.

I allude more particularly to, 1st, the art of turning linen into paper. 2ndly, the art of printing. 3dly, the composition and application of gunpowder, more especially to the purposes of war. 4thly, the discovery, or at least the general application, of the strange property of the magnetic needle to the purposes of navigation. The importance of such discoveries will be sufficiently obvious to your own reflections.

To each of these inventions and discoveries belongs an

appropriate history highly deserving of curiosity (of more curiosity indeed than can now be gratified), and each strongly illustrative of the human mind; creeping on from hint to hint, like the Portuguese mariner from cape to cape, owing something to good fortune, but far more, and even that good fortune itself, to enterprise and perseverance. You will see some notice taken of these inventions and discoveries in

Koch.

As the study of the dark ages conducts us to the ages of inventions and discoveries, so do these last to the era which was marked by the revival of learning and the Reformation. All these periods mingle with each other, the prior with the succeeding one, and no line of demarcation can be traced to separate or define them; yet may they be known, each by its more prevailing characteristic of darkness, discovery, and progress; and as we are now supposed to have passed through the first two, we must next proceed to the last, the era of the revival of learning and the Reformation.

To this era we shall be best introduced by adverting to the general situation of Europe; more particularly by turning to the eastern portion of it: for we shall here be presented with a train of events, which, if we could but transport ourselves in imagination to this fearful period, would almost totally overpower us, by appearing to threaten once more, as in the irruption of the barbarians, the very civilisation of society. For what are we here called to witness? The progress of the Turks; the terror of Bajazet ; the danger of Constantinople; and then again the unexpected appearance of savages still more dreadful than the Turks, Tamerlane and his Tartars; the extraordinary achievements of these tremendous conquerors; afterwards the revival of the Ottoman power; and at last the destruction of the Eastern Empire, of Constantinople itself.

This series of memorable events has been detailed by Mr. Gibbon with that spirit and knowledge of his subject, that compression and arrangement, which so particularly

distinguish those chapters of his work, where his theme is splendid or important, and which render them so inexhaustible a study to his more intelligent readers. I must refer you to the work, making, however, in the meantime, a few observations.

In contemplating the final extinction of the eastern empire it may be some consolation to us to think that Constantinople did not fall without a blow; that the city was not surrendered without a defence, which was worthy of this last representative of human greatness; that the emperor was a hero, and that, amid the general baseness and degeneracy, he could collect around him a few at least, whom the Romans, whom the conquerors of mankind, might not have disdained to consider as their descendants.

Some melancholy must naturally arise at the termination of this memorable siege: the extinction of human glory, the distress, the sufferings, the parting agonies of this mistress of the world.

But such sentiments, though in themselves neither useless nor avoidable, it is in vain entirely to indulge. The Grecian as well as the Roman empire, and Constantinople, the last image of both, must for ever remain amongst the innumerable instances presented by history, to prove that it is in vain for a state to expect prosperity, in the absence of private and public virtue; and that every nation where the honourable qualities of the human character are not cultivated and respected, however fortified by ancient renown, prescriptive veneration, or established power, sooner or later must be levelled with the earth and trampled under the feet of the despoiler.

The fall of Constantinople became, when too late, a subject of the most universal terror and affliction to the rest of Europe.

Yet such is the intermingled nature of all good and evil, that some benefit resulted to the world from the calamities of the empire. Constantinople had always been the great

repository of the precious remains of ancient genius. The Greeks had continued to pride themselves on their national superiority over the Barbarians of the west, and they celebrated, as exclusively their own, the great original masters of speculative wisdom and practical eloquence, the dramatists who could awaken all the passions of the heart, and the poets who could fire all the energies of the soul; Plato and Demosthenes, Sophocles and Euripides, Pindar and Homer. But though they admired, they could not emulate, the models. which they possessed. Century after century rolled away, and these inestimable treasures, however valued by those who inherited them, were lost to mankind.

Yet as the fortunes of the Greek empire declined, the intercourse between Constantinople and the rest of Europe long contributed to the improvement of the latter; and the splendour of the Greek learning and philosophy, even as early as the thirteenth century, had touched with a morning ray the summits of the great kingdoms of the west. In the public schools and universities of Italy and Spain, France and England, distinguished individuals, like our own Bacon of Oxford, applied themselves with success to the study of science, and even of the Grecian literature. In the fourteenth century the generous emulation of Petrarch and his friends gave a distinct promise of the subsequent revival of learning. While the Turks were encircling with their toils, and closing round their destined prey, the scholars of the east were continually escaping from the terror of their arms or their oppression, and after the destruction of the metropolis of the cast, it was in the west alone they could find either freedom or affluence, either dignity or leisure.

In the sack of Constantinople, amid the destruction of the libraries, one hundred and twenty thousand MSS. are said to have disappeared; but the scholars, and such of the MSS. as escaped, were transferred to a new sphere of existence; to nations that were excited by a spirit of independence and emulation, and to states and kingdoms that were not retro

grade and degenerating, as was the empire of the Greeks. The result was favourable to the world; like the idol of a pagan temple, the city of the east, though honoured and revered by succeeding generations, was still but an object of worship without life or use. When overthrown, however, and broken into fragments by a barbarian assailant, its riches were disclosed, and restored at once to activity and value.

This great event, the revival of learning, is a subject that, from its importance and extent, may occupy indefinitely the liberal inquiry of the student.

There has been an introduction to the subject, or a history of the more early appearance of the revival of learning, published in 1798 at Cadell's, which seems written by some author of adequate information, and which is deserving of perusal.

I shall, however, more particularly refer you to the notices of Robertson, in his introduction to Charles V., to those of Mosheim in his State of Learning in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries; above all, to the latter part of the fifty-third, and of the sixty-sixth chapter of Gibbon; and to the lives of Lorenzo de Medici and Leo X., by Mr. Roscoe. The observations and inquiries of writers like these will leave little to be sought after by those who consider this great event only in connection with other events, and attribute to it no more than its relative and philosophic importance. Those who wish to do more will, in the references of these eminent historians, find original authors and guides very amply sufficient to occupy and amuse the whole leisure even of a literary life.

The leading observations on this subject will not escape your reflections. That Constantinople was attacked by the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries, and might have been swept away from the earth by any of the various barbarians that infested it at an earlier time; when her scholars and her MSS. could have had no effect on the rest

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