Imatges de pàgina
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whom knowledge rather tends to sharpen into mischief than rectify into truth. That is, without presuming to judge the conscience of literary men, the amount of knowledge or facts, and the mystifying whirlwinds of conflicting opinions which the Press generates in sects and parties and individuals, has a profane effect upon superficial thinkers, who constitute the majority; and they are tempted to believe, like the ancient Greek Sophists, that truth is inscrutable, and that he is the wise man who can succeed in making every subject serve his own interest, and the worse appear the better cause. Such has been the effect of the influence of the Press. But this is analysis. This is just the breaking up of the rock into sand and soil. It is productive of material wealth in the meanwhile; and we rejoice to think that there is another Era of Re-union to succeed it. The Pulpit has held back from this analysis! It belongs to the past, and fears to enter far into the future of innovation. It commenced the Era with Protestant Analysis; but stopped and established its first formula, and forbade any further progress. A few Dissenters ventured a step or two farther; but the most of them went backward rather than forward. The Press, not the Pulpit, represents the age of analysis; and it has now arrived at the capillary system of extreme subdivision, in which every man may not only be said to be a sect of himself, but even a

congregation of sects: for he often entertains so many different opinions that his mind may be regarded as a mob of ideas.

Yet not altogether evil is this result; for it is the dissolution of old dogmatism, the neutralisation and extinction of bigotry and persecution. In it we see the root of the spirit of the new age, the spirit of charity and re-union. The end of an age of bigotry and the beginning of an age of charity must by their fusion constitute a crepuscule or dawn, in which the spirit of each is neutralised by the other; and, as this is the peculiarity of every age of transition, it often assumes the appearance of unprincipled levity, profanity, ridicule, satire, and caricature, in which the old principles are lost and the new not yet apprehended. But this, which is natural, is not alarming. On the contrary, it is hopeful. The chill of the dawn of a summer morning is not indicative of the approaching winter. It is a natural and explainable fact; and the facts of the social atmosphere are as natural and intelligible as this. But the subject more properly belongs to our own age, though we could scarcely avoid coming down to the present, in treating of the Press and it mission.

422

SCENE SECOND.

THE REVIVERS OF LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND ART.

The National Era is original in one sense, and imitative in another. It is the reproduction in principle of another Era that preceded it; not of a unitary Era (for that was the special character of its Catholic predecessor, and the alternate steps of the unitary and the divisional are necessary for progress), but a re-appearance of the Greek spirit of logical controversy, polite literature and arts, and their necessary accompaniment, free-thinking.

We cannot specify any particular epoch for the revival of this Grecian spirit, for it gradually rose like a dawn upon the world. But Providence has taken care to provide us with epochs and periods throughout the whole of the Drama, by means of certain great political occurrences which had a special influence in transforming the old into the new Times. No event is more deserving of holding this place as the date of the Renaissance than the loss of Constantinople by the Greeks, and its possession by the Turks in 1453, A.D.; for, though Manuel and John Chrysoloras had both taught Greek in Italy previous to the fall of Constantinople, yet by this reputed misfortune to Christendom, vast numbers of the learned Greeks were exiled from their country and naturalised in the

Western world, and they brought along with them not only extant copies of Greek classics unknown in the West, but the knowledge of the language itself, which was all but entirely forgotten. They also found it very profitable to translate these writings into Latin; and thus the whole volume of Greek philosophy and poetry was almost suddenly laid open to the understanding of the Latin Scholars. In this great work of resuscitation none distinguished themselves more than Constantine and John Lascaris. Constantine was welcomed in Milan by the Duke, and appointed to teach his daughter Hippolita the Greek language. For her use he wrote his Greek grammar, which was the first Greek book that issued from an Italian press. John was patronised by Leo X, who at his instigation founded a college for noble Grecian youths at Rome, from which proceeded numerous works on Greek literature. Francis I of France invited him to Paris, for a similar purpose; and though his intentions were frustrated by national wars and misfortunes, he did not dispense entirely with the services of the Greek refugee, but employed him in supplying the Royal Library in Paris with Greek manuscripts. So much indeed was done by these two men alone, that Carlo Denina says of them, that not only Italy, but all the nations of Europe, regarded them as the principal restorers of classical taste. They were both Constantinopolitan Exiles. The time was come for a revival of the spirit that

characterises the Greek mission, and the fall of Constantinople marks the epoch.

The ardour with which these Greek teachers was received at first, amounted to a passion. In the language of Coluccio Salutati to one of them, they were regarded "as the messengers of Divinity, bearing the torch of knowledge into the midst of darkness;" and they did not fail to receive the most ample encouragement from the Princes of Italy and the rich Ecclesiastics, to whom the world is indebted for that very weapon which has lowered the crest and destroyed the supremacy of the Italian peninsula.

66 They nursed the pinion that impelled the steel"

against themselves.

In this work none were more profuse and magnificent than the celebrated family of the Medici, who founded a Greek academy at Florence, under the superintendence of another exile (John Argyropylus), "from which, as from a Trojan horse," illustrious Greek linguists emerged, who spread the knowledge of that language over all the academies of Europe. The effect of this was very soon perceptible, not only in philosophy, by shaking the old Scholastic system, which had then become a mere engine of Popery, but in directing Theologians to the study of the Greek Testament, in which, directly, instead of the Latin Vulgate, they began to re-read the book of Primitive Christianity with a critical eye, and the novelty of a new, as well as

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