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transplant the taste and spirit that produced them. Athens, although plundered of her richest ornaments, shorn of the glory of her original constitution, and dependent upon Rome for protection, had still to boast of her schools and her scholars. Every scene, every edifice, every conversation, was a living lecture of elegance and erudition. Here was the venerable grove in which Plato unfolded his sublime mysteries to enraptured multitudes;-here the awful Lyceum, in which Aristotle had anatomized the springs of human intellect and action;-here the porch of Zeno, still erect and stately as its founder; and here the learned shades and winding walks of THE GARDEN of Epicurus, in which he delineated the origin and nature of things, and inculcated tranquillity and temperance. Here Homer had sung, and Apelles painted; here Sophocles had drawn tears of tenderness, and Demosthenes fired the soul to deeds of heroism and patriotic revenge. The monuments of every thing great or glorious, dignified or refined, wise or virtuous, were still existing at Athens; and she had still philosophers to boast of, who were worthy of her fairest days, of her most resplendent reputation.*

To this celebrated city, therefore, this theatre of universal learning, the Roman youth of all the first families were sent for education. And at the period we are now contemplating, we meet with the following names, as costudents, and chiefly attendants upon the Epicurean school, forming a most extraordinary concentration of juvenile talents and genius: Tully, and his two brothers Lucius and Quintus, the last of whom was afterward a poet, and as signally distinguished in the profession of arms, as the first was in that of eloquence; Titus Pomponius, from his critical knowledge of the Greek tongue surnamed Atticus, but who derives this higher praise from Cornelius Nepos, that "he never deviated from the truth, nor would associate with any one who had done so ;" Lucretius, author of the well-known poem on the Nature of Things; Caius Memmius, the bosom friend of Lucretius, of whose talents and learning the writings of Tully offer abundant proofs, and to whom Lucretius dedicated his poem; Lucretius Vespilio, whom Cicero has enumerated among the orators of his day; Marcus Junius Brutus, Caius Cassius, and Caius Velleius, each of whom immortalized himself by preferring the freedom of his country to the friendship of Cæsar. And when to these I add the names of the following contemporaries, most of whom, we have reason to believe, were also co-students at Athens with those just enumeratedJulius Cæsar himself, Crassus, Sulpitius, Calvus, Varro, Catullus, Sallust, Hortensius, Calpurnius, Piso, Marcus, Marcellus, whose son Caius married Octavia, the sister of Augustus, Atheius, and Asinius Pollio, to whom Virgil dedicated his fourth eclogue, and who founded, expressly for the use of his country, one of the most splendid and extensive libraries the republic was ever possessed of, collected from the spoils of all the enemies he had at any time subdued, and still farther enriched by him at a vast expense,—we meet with a galaxy of talents and learning, which neither the Augustan nor any other age in the whole history of the Roman republic can presume to rival.

It was the son of Octavia whose ripening virtues and untimely death Virgil is so well known to have referred to in the pathetic tribute introduced into the vision of Æneas:

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This accomplished youth, the delight of the Roman people, appears to have been well entitled to so high a compliment. It was the intention of his uncle Augustus that he should succeed him, and Virgil received from Octavia, for the verses that related to Marcellus, a pecuniary present of the value of £2500. Cicero acted wisely, therefore, in sending, as he expressly declares he did, all his young friends to Greece, who evinced a love of study, "that they * See the author's Life of Lucretius, prefixed to his Translation of the Nature of Things, p. xxix. Eneid. vi. 881.

might drink from fountains rather than from rivulets."-" Meos amicos, in quibus est studium, in Græciam mitto: id est ad Græciam ire jubeo: ut ea à fontibus potius hauriant, quàm rivulos consectentur."*

Horace alludes to the same seat of learning, and nearly the same habit of studying there in his own case, by way of finishing his education, after having read Homer at home :

Romæ nutriri mihi contigit, atque doceri,
Iratus Grajis quantum nocuisset Achilles.
Adjicere bonæ paulò plus artis Athenæ :
Scilicet ut possem curvo dignoscere rectum,
Atque inter silvas Academi quærere verum.f
At Rome I first was bred, and early taught
What woes to Greece Achilles' anger wrought.
Famed Athens added some increase of skill
In the great art of knowing good from ill;
And led me, yet an inexperienced youth,
To academic groves in search of truth.
BOSCAWEN

Nor were other branches of science, or even the extensive circle of arts and manufactures, forgotten in the midst of the fashionable study of philosophy and literature, either at Rome or in the Greek states. We have not time to enter into a survey of the very extensive and, in various respects, accurate views that were taken of many of the most important pursuits of our own day, and the activity with which they were followed up. In statuary and architecture, as well as in poetry and eloquence, the models of ancient Rome, as well as of ancient Greece, are still the models of our own times. We have already touched upon the skill of the Greek masters in the art of designing; which they practised with great perfection in every diversity, from simple outline or linear drawing, to every variety of silhouette, or light and shadow, as well as every kind of painting with colours; while in one or two varieties they went far beyond our own day, as in encaustic painting, both on wax and on ivory; a branch of the art which has, unfortunately, been lost for ages, yet the most valuable of all, as being the most durable. Their acquirements are truly astonishing in almost every ramification of invention or execution that the mind can follow up; and the progress which we have still proofs of their having exhibited in metallurgy, crystallography, mirrors, mineralogy, chemistry, mechanics, navigation, optics and catoptrics, weaving, dyeing, pottery, and a multiplicity of other manufacturing or handicraft trades, must appear incredible to those who have not deeply entered into the subject. Their splendid purple cloths-Babylonica magnifico colore-have, perhaps, never been equalled since; the immense and fearful machinery invented by Archimedes, at Syracuse, for laying hold of the largest and most formidable Roman galleys with its ponderous and gigantic arms, and whirling them with instantaneous destruction into the air, as they approached the walls of this famous city during its siege ;-the burning-glasses contrived by him for setting them on fire at a distance, by a concentration of the sun's heat alone; their knowledge of the existence and fall of meteoric stonesnot many years ago laughed at as a chimera among ourselves;-and the adumbration, to call it by no stricter term, with which the grand principles of the Copernican system of the heavens was approached by Nicetas, Philolaus, Aristarchus, and other disciples of the Copernican school,-are, I trust, sufficient proofs of the truth of this remark, though hundreds of other examples might be added to the list.

Still, however, the observation I have made with respect to the education and study of the Athenians applies with considerable, though not altogether with equal, force to those of the Romans. Elegance and accomplishment seem rather to have been the chief objects of attainment than deep physical

t

† Epist. Lib. II. ii. 41.

Acad. Quest. i. 2. On a former occasion the author had an opportunity of following up and developing this interesting subject at considerable length; and those who are desirous of pursuing it with him, may turn to the running commentary to his Translation of Lucretius, vol. i. p. 338. 414; vol. ii. p. 50. 131. 135. 154. 159. 401 491. 568.

and analytical science. Polite literature and statistics were almost swallowed up in the vortex of natural philosophy; and logic, or rather dialectics, usurped the place of induction. Rome, moreover, like Athens, does not appear to have been possessed of any public establishment for a general course of science, similar either to the universities or the Institutions of the present day.

There are various writers who have endeavoured to draw up lists of Greek and Roman names, from the books that have descended to us of persons who were celebrated, in their respective eras, in different branches of the arts and sciences. Among the most complete of these are the tables of the Baron de Sainte Croix, of the Academy of Belles Lettres: and as nothing can give us a clearer idea of the prevailing taste and inclination of a people, than a comparison of the numbers of those engaged in one department with those engaged in others, I have taken some pains to form, from these tables, an estimate to this effect. The tables extend through nearly the whole range of Grecian history (though they are confined to that history), from the uncertain times of Orpheus and Cadmus to that of Euclid; or, in other words, from the commencement of the twelfth or thirteenth to the close of the third century before the Christian era.

They contain the names of 863 persons, as artists or men of literature: and upon arranging them into their different classes, I find the relative proportion as follows:

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Hence it appears, that far more persons were engaged in the two last classes, or those of poetry, music, and painting, and of statuary and sculpture, than in all the other classes collectively; that next to these, the legislators and philosophers were most numerous, and then the orators, rhetoricians, and sophists; that, but little comparative attention was paid to natural history and agriculture, and still less to mechanics; and that not a single name has reached us in the departments of mineralogy, statics, hydrostatics, trades, and manufactures; to say nothing of chemistry and pneumatics, which may principally be regarded as sciences of modern times.

That several of these latter departments were studied to a certain extent is unquestionable; but it is also unquestionable that that extent must have been very limited, since otherwise the names of those who had studied or cultivated them must have descended to the present day in some of the writings that have reached us.

This comparative view of the arts and sciences of Greece may, with little variation, be applied to those of Rome. The study of the fine arts, however, was here less extensive; and the race of orators and political demagogues, in consequence of the peculiar character of the government and of the people, more numerous. Natural history and agriculture, moreover, appear to have made more progress, and various branches of trade and manufacture to have been cultivated with more success.

Upon the whole, however, Rome added but little to what she derived from Greece: nor has much been added in any subsequent era, or by any nation amid which the variable fortunes of science and literature have compelled them to take shelter, till within the course of the last two centuries; towards

the beginning of which period Lord Bacon observed, with not more severity than correctness, that "the sciences which we profess have flowed almost entirely from the Greeks; for those which the Roman or Arabian, or still later writers, have added, are but few, and these few of but little moment; and, whatever they may be, are built upon the foundation of what the Greeks invented; so that the judgment, or rather the prophecy of the Egyptian priest, concerning the Greeks, is by no means inapplicable, that they should always continue boys, nor possess either the antiquity of science, nor the science of antiquity.'

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It remained for this extraordinary character, who thus fairly estimated in his own day the value of ancient and modern learning, to break through the spell which fatally pressed upon it, and seemed to prohibit all farther progress. It is to Bacon, and almost to Bacon alone, that we are indebted, if not for the scientific discoveries that have enriched the last two centuries, and struck home to every man's business and bosom, at least for that mode of generalizing the laws of nature, and of connecting the various branches of the different arts and sciences, which have chiefly contributed to those discoveries; which have called mankind from the study of words to the study of things, and have established from the book of nature the truth of that maxim, which had hitherto only loosely floated in the books of the poets, that

All are but parts of one stupendous whole.

It was my intention, in proof of this assertion, to have taken a brief survey, even before we closed the present lecture, of the shifting scenes of science and literature from the decline of the Roman empire to their re-establishment in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; to have given a glance at them in their retreat amid the eastern and western caliphats, in what have usually been called the dark ages of the world, extending from the fifth, but especially from the seventh to the fifteenth century; to have contemplated them on their reappearance and first spread, their resurrection and restoration to life and action, under the fostering providence of the illustrious houses of Medici, Urbino, Gonzaga, and Este; from which last, the most ancient and most distinguished of the whole, our own royal family derive their descent; to have surveyed them as basking under the patronage of Leo X.; but especially as they were affected by the wonderful and all-controlling influence of the Reformation which occurred during his papacy; and to have compared the character they then assumed, with that which they exhibit in our own day;but, interesting as the subject is, I am compelled by want of time to postpone it till our next lecture, when I shall return to the subject, and carry it forward as the period will allow.

I shall only farther observe, that, on the first reviviscence of literature, it was chiefly limited to classical and philosophical subjects, and confined to the courts of princes, or the walls of universities, which were now establishing in almost every state of Europe; the classical or ornamental-branches being mostly cultivated in the courts, and the speculative or philosophical in the schools. And such, with little variation, continued to be the course of learning, till the appearance of that great luminary in the hemisphere of letters to whom I have just adverted. No sooner, however, had the writings of Bacon, and of other characters of a similar comprehensiveness of mind, who co-operated in his views, become diffused, than institutions of another class were found wanting:—a something that might fill up the space between the cloistered scholar and the irrecondite citizen: the dry principles of speculative science, and the living practice of the artist and the mechanic. And hence, academies and societies for natural knowledge became organized and incorporated-museums were founded-taste, ingenuity, and invention commenced a happy intercourse-the general results of their communications were, for the most part, periodically published, and the great mass of mankind became more generally enlightened than in any former period of the world.

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But a mode of acquiring a familiar and systematic initiation into the general circle of the arts and sciences was still felt desirable for the body of the people; a sort of rudimental education, by which they might be able to assist and appropriate the knowledge that was flowing around them in every direction; that might call forth their own energies and resources, and reflect with increased lustre the light in which they were walking. And hence have arisen these scientific schools which are now commonly known by the name of Institutions; and especially, if I mistake not, the school I have the honour of addressing.

An establishment of this kind, to be perfect, should be possessed of a library adequate to every inquiry—a laboratory and a museum of equal extent, and a course of instruction commensurate with the whole circle of the sciences. Such an establishment, however, is not to be expected; and especially in our own country, where the government is seldom solicited for assistance, and the sole endowment results from the joint patronage and contribution of individuals. All that remains for us, therefore, is to make the best use of the means that are in our power, and to carry them to the utmost extent they will reach; and I can honestly congratulate the members of the Institution before me with having, in this respect, conscientiously acted up to the fullest limits of their duty, and of having rather set an example than followed one; for it is a matter of notoriety to the world at large, that there is no other Institution in which the same measure of income has heen extended to the same measure of acquiring knowledge, whether by books or by lectures.

LECTURE XII.

ON THE MIDDLE OR DARK AGES.

Ir we examine the history of Europe in a literary point of view, we shall find it consist of three distinct periods-an era of light, of darkness, and of light restored. To the first of these periods I directed your attention in the preceding lecture. We noticed the general state of literature and the mode of education adopted in Greece and Rome, at the most splendid epochs of these celebrated republics, and briefly compared them with the means of acquiring knowledge in our own day; and we at the same time glanced rapidly at the intervening space, or middle period; or rather only touched upon a few of its leading features, from an impossibility of compressing even a miniature sketch of its history into the limits of a single lecture; though it may be remembered that I threw out a pledge of returning to the subject on the present occasion, and of investigating it in a more regular detail.

A part of that pledge I shall now, by your permission, endeavour to redeem; by taking a survey of the general literature, or ignorance of mankind, which characterized that wonderful era which has usually been described by the name of the DARK, or MIDDLE AGES; and which extends from the fall of Rome before the barbarous arms of the Goths, in the fifth century, to the fall of Constantinople before the equally barbarous arms of the Turks, in the fifteenth century; thus comprising a long afflictive night of not less than a thousand years; yet occasionally illuminated by stars of the first magnitude and splendour: and big with the important events of the sack of Alexandria and the destruction of its library; the triumph and establishment of the Saracens, and their expulsion from Spain; the devastation of Europe, and the overthrow of its ancient governments in favour of the feudal system, by successive currents of barbarians from the north-west of Asia, pouring down under the various names of Alans, Huns, Ostrogoths, and Visigoths, or Eastern and Western Goths; sometimes in separate tides, and sometimes in one

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