Augusta Theodosia Drane

DANTE AND PETRARCH.

A.D. 1300 TO 1400.

In what has hitherto been said of the universities, which in the thirteenth century had fairly established themselves as the great organs of education, it has not been possible to convey any just or satisfactory notion of the exact nature of those studies fostered within their schools. The reader will perhaps have gathered a general idea that a great change had been gradually effected since the days of St. Anselm; that humane letters were becoming neglected, and that scholastic philosophy and canon law had even threatened at one time to discourage the cultivation of Scriptural and patristic studies; that theology, on the other hand, had become digested into a scientific system by the great scholastic doctors, who had reinstated the study of the Scriptures and the Biblical tongues, but who had not done much to restore polite letters; and finally, that the physical sciences had made a certain sensible advance. This general statement has in it a fair amount of truth; nevertheless, general statements are such unsatisfactory things, that the desire rises to one’s mind that some scholar of our old universities could be put on his examination before a Royal Commission, and tell us with his own lips what he did, and what he did not, learn from his mediÆval teachers. The wish is not so extravagant as it might appear. Fortunately for our purpose, one scholar existed who gathered in himself the learning of Padua, Bologna, Paris, and Oxford Universities, for he studied successively at them all, and has left the result in writings, which for six centuries have been submitted to close critical examination, and are still in our hands. A glance through their pages promises, therefore, to give us some information on the point in question.

It was probably some time in the reign of Edward I., that among the 30,000 students who crowded the inns and hostels of old Oxford, there appeared an Italian of middle age, of whose previous career at other universities we know no more, than that at Padua and Bologna he had addicted himself to moral and natural philosophy; that at Paris he was held to be a first-rate theologian; and that returning thither a second time, after political troubles had driven him into exile, he had held a disputation against fourteen opponents, had taken his bachelor’s degree, and was only prevented by an empty purse from graduating as master; and finally, that both at Paris and elsewhere he had evinced a marked predilection for the mystical interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. These are all the traces that he has left behind him in the schools, and yet how well we know him! The countenances of Shakespeare or Byron, or Sir Walter Scott, are not more familiar to us than the grand and melancholy features of Dante Alighieri, whom we claim as an Oxford student, on the authority of John de Serraville, Bishop of Fermo, a writer who, as he lived only a century later than the poet, may be supposed to have derived his information from contemporary sources.[260] Plain in dress, temperate in his habits, polished and dignified in his manners, which were, however, dashed with more than a touch of sarcasm,—a man of few words, given to long fits of abstraction, his form a little stooping, his sight early impaired by excessive application to his books; something of an artist, and such a lover of music that, as he tells us, it had power to soothe him even in the worst of times, an exquisite caligrapher, as they attest who have seen his writing, and describe it as magra e lunga, e molto corretta, a close and curious observer of nature, and above all, of the phenomena of the starry heavens, a perfect scholar, yet, withal, a soldier too, well skilled in all the martial exercises that became his rank—such was he whom we have ventured to select as the representative man of the Catholic universities as they existed before that new era of taste and literature which was ushered in by his countryman Petrarch.

Dante is acknowledged by all critics to have been the most learned of the poets, not excepting Milton, the character of whose genius so closely resembles his own. His learning was characteristic of his age: the extraordinary prominence given in his poem to the scholastic theology and philosophy tells us at once in what century it was composed. Aristotle, Christianised and interpreted by St. Thomas, is the master whom he follows;[261] yet perhaps he is not quite so exclusive an Aristotelian as most scholastics of his time, for it is evident that he had studied Plato with almost equal attention, specially the TimÆus of that philosopher, to which he frequently refers. He, however, invariably gives the preference to Aristotle, whom he calls, “the master among the wise;” whereas Petrarch assigns the first place to Plato. But “Dante the Theologian,” as he is called in his epitaph, had other masters besides the Greeks. He who had won his bachelor’s degree in fair fight against fourteen opponents, a reminiscence to which he refers in his poem, had to be furnished with arms from the scholastic arsenal. Accordingly, when he describes himself as undergoing the questioning of the Apostles on the subject of Faith, Hope, and Charity, he gives his answers in the language of the Master of the Sentences, as well as of St. Denys the Areopagite, and St. Augustine. His diction is thickly sown with the phraseology of the schools, with “quiddities,” “syllogisms,” “propositions,” “demonstrations,” and the like; yet when he comes to make his profession of faith, how sublimely does he rise above these technicalities, and declare that his belief rests neither on physical nor metaphysical proof, but on the testimony of the Holy Ghost, on Moses, the Prophets, the Psalms, and the Gospels.[262] Elsewhere he appeals to the teaching of St. Jerome, St. Isidore, St. Gregory, St. Bernard, and most of the other Latin Fathers, and names with loving reverence not a few of those monastics and schoolmen with whom we have made acquaintance in the foregoing pages, such as Bede and Rabanus, St. Peter Damian, Peter Comestor, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, and Albert the Great. But above all these appear St. Thomas and St. Buonaventura, the former of whom is, beyond all doubt, the guide of Dante in philosophy and theology, and whom he introduces in the thirteenth canto of the Paradiso, speaking in his own person, and using the scientific phraseology of the schools.

The political opinions set forth by Dante are no less characteristic of the mediÆval university student than his theological views. Born of a family attached to a party of the Guelphs, he himself kept aloof for some time from either faction, and, as Chief Prior of Florence, aimed at holding an even balance between them. This line of conduct gave little satisfaction to the Neri, as the Florentine Guelphs were called; and they accused him, as it would seem not without cause, of concealing, under the show of impartiality, a secret leaning towards the Ghibellines. On occasion of a popular insurrection, the Priors agreed to banish the leaders of both parties; on this the Guelphs leagued to call in the assistance of Charles of Valois, Captain-General to Pope Boniface VIII. This appeal to the protection of the hated lilies of France moved Dante to an act of severity which proved his own ruin. The banished chiefs of the Bianchi were recalled, while those of the Neri remained in exile. Driven to extremity, the Guelphs despatched an envoy to Rome, entreating the Pope to put the pacification of Florence into the hands of Charles of Valois. Dante hastened to Rome to oppose this demand, but in his absence another popular Émeute broke out, the Neri triumphed, their exiles were recalled, and in their turn decreed banishment and loss of goods against their enemies. The original document is still preserved, in which, to the sentence of confiscation is added that of burning alive, decreed against Dante and fourteen other citizens, should they ever again set foot in Florence.[263]

It must be admitted that if the writings of Dante exhibit after this time all the bitterness of “Ghibelline bile,” there was some excuse to be made for him. Almost against his own will he had been thrown from his position of theoretic impartiality into the arms of the Ghibelline faction. Not that he ever entirely embraced their cause; he had good sense enough to admit that truth is seldom to be found in the ranks of party, and owned in after years that it was hard to say whether Guelph or Ghibelline were most to be blamed for the evils which their animosities had brought upon Italy.[264] He felt for the sufferings of his country scarcely less than for his own; and the only remedy which he saw for the miseries resulting from the rage of factions was the establishment of a firm monarchical government, such as was presented in the theory of the Holy Roman Empire. This fancy he dwelt on and idealised till he came to believe that Empire a thing of divine institution, applying to it the words of the Apostle, “There is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.” The extravagances into which he suffered himself to be led on this subject are not entirely to be referred to the influence of his university studies, yet it is certain that the principles current in all the great academies offered nothing to correct the absolutism of his political creed. Bologna had received her “Habita” from the Emperor Frederic II., in reward for the good services which her lawyers had rendered him in supporting his claims against the Italian Communi. Paris was on the very eve of supporting the sacrilegious enormities of Philip le Bel. At Oxford, the greatest law school north of the Alps, the imperial jurisprudence formed the favourite study; and though, with that happy inconsequence which is the national characteristic, the English would none of it for practical purposes, yet they learnt enough from their law studies to induce them to support a course of legislation, the ultimate result of which was the establishment of a royal supremacy.

In all these academies the supremacy of the temporal power was, in one form or other, the favourite political dogma, and the tendency of their teaching was, perhaps, more directly anti-Papal than that of the Italian poet, for Dante’s Ghibellinism, bitter and resentful as it was, never clouded the instincts of his faith. He regarded Boniface VIII. as his personal enemy, and attributed to his intervention the revolution that had driven him into exile. With the terrible anger of his silent nature which suppressed every outward demonstration of passion, he pursued and made war upon him with his pen; yet the hatred he felt for the man never blinded him as to the character of his office. When he comes to speak of the outrages committed against him at the instigation of Philip le Bel, he forgets that it is his enemy who is being thus dealt with, and gives expression to the deep religious sense of a child of Holy Church in lines for ever memorable. He beholds Christ once more mocked and derided in the person of His Vicar, he sees the gall and vinegar renewed, execrates the cruelty of the new Pilate and the new thieves, and weeps over the sufferings of the Church, whose woes are now, he says, the theme of every prayer.[265] Indeed, in all save his politics, Dante reflects the spirit of the ages of faith. The grim grotesqueness which mingles with his most terrible pictures breathes the identical character to be found in the illuminations and sculptures of the same period, evincing an intense sense of certain grave realities which the mediÆval artists never shrank from picturing to the mind and eye. The liturgical spirit, too, is there, reminding us almost at every page that we are reading the words of one who lived when the office of the Church was still the Prayer Book of the faithful, and when university students, like St. Edmund, or Jordan of Saxony, were accustomed to rise at midnight and attend the singing of Matins in their parish church.[266] Some of the most exquisite passages of his poem owe their beauty to the skill with which he has woven into his verse passages and phrases from the Psalms, the Breviary Hymns, and other devotions of the Church. Yet Dante was very far from being exclusively a theologian and a scholastic. His writings offer sufficient evidence that the scholars of the thirteenth century were familiar with other Latin than that of Duns Scotus. He had closely studied all the Latin poets, and sometimes translates or paraphrases entire lines from Virgil. His mind was so steeped in the history and mythology of the ancients, that many of his pages, if translated, might be taken for quotations from Milton; for like him he possessed the art of stringing together a series of classic names and allusions, the melody of which makes us willing to pardon their pedantry. One example may suffice, which shall be given in its English dress, the better to convey the resemblance which it bears to kindred Miltonic passages. It is the poet Virgil who is speaking to Statius, and describing the state of the good heathen in limbo:—

Every one of the names here named are Greek, and it is clear that Dante was well acquainted with the stories of the Greek poets; but was he also acquainted with their language? This is a question fiercely debated by his commentators, and considered to be still an unresolved problem. In his prose work, the “Convito,” he has criticised an erroneous translation from Aristotle, and in one of the finest passages of the “Purgatorio” introduces a Greek word, which alone has furnished matter for a voluminous controversy.[268] These and other passages have led many to give him credit for being possessed of Greek scholarship. The point is not decided, but the probability appears to be that his knowledge of the language was at any rate not very profound. In the same way he may be said to have been not totally unacquainted with Hebrew and Arabic, for several explanations of Hebrew words occur in his works, and the mysterious words which he places with so tremendous and dramatic an effect in the mouth of Nimrod,[269] are declared by one critic to be Arabic, and by another to be Syriac; but are more probably, as Bianchi observes, a jumble of sounds chosen from the Oriental dialects, and intended to convey a notion of the confusion of tongues, and to startle the ear with their uncouth cabalistic sound. Without claiming for our poet the merit of Hebrew and Oriental learning, we may at least gather from such passages that he had studied in schools where these tongues were not entirely unknown, where the decree of Clement V. was probably carried out, and professors were to be found who could furnish him with enough of Eastern erudition to serve his purpose. On other points his acquirements were, however, far less superficial. The trivium and quadrivium in all their branches are easy enough to be traced through his writings. He is known to have been a proficient in music. He refers to the quadrature of the circle and other problems of geometry, but astronomy was evidently his science of predilection, and occupies a very considerable place in his poem. He wrote at a time when the Pythagorean system was the only accepted theory, and his scientific allusions can of course only be explained according to its supposed laws. But he did not draw all his ideas from the books of the ancients. In his “Convito,” after giving the various explanations of the Milky-way furnished by Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, and others, some of them sufficiently absurd, he decides in favour of the opinion that there is a multitude of fixed stars in that part of the heavens, so small (or, as we should now say, so distant), that we cannot separately distinguish them, but which cause the appearance of whiteness. The other views, he observes, seem devoid of reason. The astronomer, Ideler, was the first to point out that Dante’s description in the opening canto of the “Purgatorio” of the four stars,[270] which he makes symbolic of the four cardinal virtues, betrays a knowledge of the constellation of the Southern Cross, of which he may have heard from the Genoese and Pisan mariners who had visited Cape Comorin, and which he may even have seen depicted on that curious globe constructed by the Arabs in 1225, where it was distinctly marked. He had attentively studied geography, and notices many such points as find a place in our manuals of the globes, such as the intersection of the great circles, as they are exhibited on the armillary sphere; and reminds us that within the torrid zone at certain seasons no shadows fall, on account of the sun being then directly overhead.[271] Tiraboschi gives him credit for anticipating a supposed discovery of Galileo’s, that wine is nothing but the heat of the sun mingled with the juice of the grape; and Maffei comments on the “marvellous felicity” with which he expresses his scientific ideas. The theory of the attraction of gravitation[272] is stated as distinctly in his pages as in those of Vincent de Beauvais; and his allusions to the nature of plants and the habits of animals, and particularly of birds, seem to evince, not merely a familiarity with the works of Albert the Great, but the observant eye of a real naturalist.[273] His artistic feeling appears in a thousand passages, which were afterwards given a visible shape by Orcagna, and so many other painters of the early Florentine school; as well as in some wonderful landscape-painting in words, which, as Humboldt says, “manifest profound sensibility to the aspect of external nature.” Such is his description, imitated by so many later Italian poets, of the birds beginning their morning songs in the pine forest of Chiassi, of the dawning light trembling on the distant sea, of the goatherd watching his flocks among the hills, and of the flowery meadow illuminated by a sudden ray of sunlight darting through the broken clouds.[274] He never directly alludes to those grand creations of Christian art, the cathedrals, most of which were coeval in their rise with the European universities. Yet he continually reminds us that he lived when religious artists were carving the sacred sculptures on their walls, or filling their windows with a mystic splendour, and that he had felt the power of those vaulted aisles, which he had, perhaps, visited as a pilgrim.[275]

Enough has been said to indicate the nature of Dante’s learning, which was undoubtedly the learning of his time. It differed from that of his contemporaries in degree, but not in kind. When Mr. Berington gives expression to his delight at having at last found a man who could admire Virgil, he shows not only a very imperfect appreciation of the acquirements of mediÆval scholars, but even of the poet whom he condescends to praise. Dante’s aim was avowedly to write a popular poem; he desired to be read, not merely by the learned, but by the mass of his countrymen; and it was with this object that he sacrificed his first intention of writing in Latin verse, and chose the rude Italian vernacular, not without a certain regret, but with the design of being more widely intelligible, for, to use his own words, “we must not give meat to sucklings.” We may safely dare to affirm that had not the Latin classics been freely admitted into the Christian schools of the thirteenth century, Dante would never have ventured to have chosen Virgil as his representative of Moral Philosophy. And if the world to which he addressed himself had not known something—perhaps a good deal—of classical history and poetry, his poem could not have achieved the popularity at which he successfully aimed. But it is probable that on this point things were not greatly changed from what they had been in the days of his ancestor Cacciaguida, when, as he tells us, the ladies of Florence, as they sat with their maidens,

Certain it is that the erudition of the “Divina Commedia” proved no obstacle to its popularity. There is nothing in the history of literature that can be at all compared with the instantaneous conquest which it achieved over the Italian public. Within thirty years of the poet’s death an Archbishop of Milan appointed a carefully-chosen commission of learned men to write a commentary on the poem; Florence, which had cast him out of her walls when living, now founded a public lecture to explain his works; and in 1373, called on Bocaccio to deliver this lecture in the Church of St. Stefano, at the annual salary of a hundred florins.

We are not, however, concerned with the literary history of Dante, who is only here spoken of as the representative scholar of his times. His profound learning has never been disputed; yet it is worthy of remark that if it be good criticism to measure a man’s scholarship solely by the style of his Latin compositions, we should have to number the author of the “Divina Commedia” among the other writers whose “incredible ignorance” disgraced their age. His prose treatises, De Monarchia and De Vulgari Eloquio, in substance learned and full of acute observation, are declared to be rude and unclassical in style; a fact which suggests doubts how far this standard of criticism is a just one. It was fortunate indeed that he abandoned his first purpose of writing his poem in the Latin tongue, and chose rather that vernacular idiom which he raised to the dignity of a language. How he dealt with it is the real marvel; he built up his verse, much as the Athenians constructed their walls in the days of Themistocles, laying hold of any material that came in his way, quarrying words and phrases out of the Latin at his pleasure, filling up chinks and vacancies with verbs and adjectives which, whatever may have been their plebeian origin, became ennobled by his use; and creating many a good strong word of mighty meaning which it would have been well if his countrymen could have persuaded themselves to retain. After his time the formation of the Italian language rapidly developed, and the majestic mass which had been hewn into shape by Dante, received a finer and softer polish from Bocaccio and Petrarch.

Of the latter poet we now have to speak; for any sketch of mediÆval scholarship would be imperfect without some notice of him who is commonly regarded as the restorer of polite letters. The father of Petrarch had been banished from Florence at the same time with Dante; and when a child, he himself had once beheld the great poet, whose fame he was in some respects destined to surpass. When he was nine years old his parents removed to Avignon in France, where the establishment of the papal court drew many Italians. There for four years he learnt as much grammar, logic, and rhetoric as the schools of Avignon and Carpentras could teach, and that does not appear to have been much. However, even at this age his classic tastes betrayed themselves. Whilst his comrades were still reading Æsop’s fables and the verses of Prosper, he studied the works of Cicero, which delighted his ear long before he understood their sense. Then came another four years at Montpelier, after which he went to Bologna, and there studied civil law for three years more. But as soon as he found himself removed from his father’s watchful eye the study of jurisprudence somewhat languished. “It was thus,” he says, “that I spent, or rather wasted, seven years; and if I must say the truth, disgusted with my legal studies, I spent my time mostly in reading Cicero, Virgil, and the other poets. My father learnt this, and one day he unexpectedly appeared before me. Guessing at once the object of his coming, I hastily hid the great Latins, but he drew them from their hiding-place, and threw them into the fire, as if they had been books of heresy. At this sight I cried out as though I myself had been burnt. My father, seeing my affliction, drew out two volumes half-scorched with the flames, and holding one in his left and the other in his right hand, he said, “Here, this is Virgil, take it, and it will comfort your soul a little—and here is Cicero, you may have him too, for he will teach you how to plead.” Somewhat consoled by this, I ceased my lamentations.”

But a lawyer Petrarch was determined never to become. In 1327, having lost both his parents, he returned to Avignon, put on the ecclesiastical dress, and received the tonsure; but he had no more serious intention of following the clerical than the legal profession. He cared only for a life of literary ease, and the “graceful indolence” which has been declared to form one of the charms of his verses, was the predominant feature in his character. It was at this time that he formed that attachment to Laura de Sade which inspired the 400 sonnets, and other “Rime,” which have made the celebrity of their author. At once to soothe his grief and to satisfy his curiosity, he undertook a voyage through France and Germany. He visited Paris, and describes its University as “a basket filled with the rarest fruits of every land.” The French, he says, are “gay of humour, fond of society, and pleasant in conversation; they make war on care by diversion, singing, laughing, eating, and drinking.” He visited Toulouse, and was introduced to the famous academy of the Gaie Science, established in 1324, of which Laura de Sade was herself a member. Seven poets, with a chancellor at their head, held their meetings in a palace surrounded by beautiful gardens, and solemnly granted the degrees of bachelor or doctor to the candidates for Parnassian honours, the prize for the best poem produced at the floral games of the month of May being a golden violet. At last he returned to Avignon, and, retiring to a country house in the solitude of Vaucluse, composed, amid its woods and fountains, some of his sweetest Italian sonnets, some Latin prose treatises, and his heroic Latin poem of “Africa,” on which he bestowed immense labour. Great, indeed, would have been his own surprise could he have foreseen that posterity would have cared nothing at all for the classical imitations which procured him his laurel crown from the hands of the Roman Senate, and that his immortality as a poet would rest on those careless rhymes which he calls the unpremeditated songs of his juvenile sorrows, and which, being written in the despised vernacular tongue, he counted as of little merit. It was as a Latin writer that he desired to be remembered, and it was the fame of his “Africa” that induced the Senate of Rome and the University of Paris to offer him their honours on the same day. Petrarch’s classic predilections, and his intense love of his native country, determined him to give the preference to Rome; and after a three days’ examination, which was presided over by the learned King Robert of Naples, he was crowned on the Capitol, on Easter-day, 1341, and hung up his laurel wreath in the Basilica of the Apostles.

The rest of his life was chiefly spent in Italy, where the reigning princes of the Visconti, the Este, the Scaligeri, and the Gonzaga vied one with another in doing him honour. He devoted himself with a sort of passionate eagerness to the enterprise of seeking out copies of the neglected classics, and his correspondents in all parts of Europe assisted him in his labours. Cicero was his literary idol, and when the strangers who crowded round him asked him what presents they could send him from their distant lands, his reply was ever, “Nothing but the works of Cicero.” He rescued from oblivion some of the epistles of his favourite author, and was once possessed of a copy of his treatise De Gloria, now lost to the world. He had almost an equal zeal in collecting and preserving medals and ancient monuments of art, and severely reprehended the practice, so common among the Romans, of destroying the venerable remains of antiquity, in order to procure building materials at an easy rate. Though never able to master the Greek language, he had the consolation of witnessing the first steps which ushered in the revival of that study. In 1339, Barlaam, a Calabrian monk who had for many years been a resident in Greece, was despatched to Avignon on a mission to Pope Benedict XII., from the Emperor Cantacuzenus. Petrarch took some lessons in Greek from him, but had too little perseverance to profit much from his master’s lessons. Barlaam is declared by Bocaccio to have been a treasury of every kind of learning, and superior to any other scholar of the time. He wrote on theology, astronomy, and mathematics, and was well acquainted with the ancient Greek poetry. And so, after all, the Greek literature was restored to Europe through the instrumentality of a monk! For it was one of Barlaam’s disciples, by name Leontius Pilate, also a Calabrian, who afterwards visited Petrarch at Venice, and from whom Bocaccio acquired a knowledge of Greek. The latter scholar persuaded the Florentine magistrates to appoint Leontius Greek professor in their city, and in 1361 the first Greek chair was erected in the West, and curious crowds flocked to listen to lectures on the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” delivered from the lips of one whose outward appearance was that of an uncouth savage. He wore the philosopher’s, or rather the beggar’s, mantle, his countenance was hideous, his beard long and uncombed, his manners rude, and his temper gloomy. He remained at Florence three years, and then returned to the East to search for manuscripts; but such was his overbearing insolence that, in spite of his treasures of classic erudition, Petrarch would have nothing to say to him when he proposed a second visit to Italy. Leontius, however, embarked on board a vessel with the intention of returning to Florence, but was overtaken by a tempest, and struck dead by lightning. Petrarch was concerned at his loss, and yet more so by the fear that his books had perished with him. “Inquire, I beseech you,” he wrote to Bocaccio, “whether there were not a Euripides or a Sophocles among them, or some other of the books he promised to bring me.” He had already procured from Nicholas Sigeros a Greek Homer, which he prized, though unable to read it. “Your Homer,” he writes, “is dumb to me, and I am deaf to it; nevertheless, the sight of it consoles me, and I often kiss its cover. I beg of you send me Hesiod, send me Euripides.”

It was not only by the Italian dukes and princes that Petrarch was cherished; the Popes—Benedict XII., Clement VI., and Urban V.—all testified their sense of his merit, and enriched him with many benefices, and Urban is said to have been somewhat influenced in his determination to revisit Rome by the arguments of the poet. For whilst Petrarch allowed his pen the most unwarrantable freedoms in censuring the conduct of the papal court, he had nothing more at heart than the restoration of the Popes to their ancient capital, and on this point he shared the sentiments of Dante. Neither were the middle and lower classes at all behind their betters in the enthusiasm with which they regarded the great scholar. A certain grammar-master who had grown half-blind and wholly crippled, hearing that Petrarch was at Naples, determined to go thither to see him, and made his son carry him there on his shoulders. By the time they arrived the poet had departed for Rome. However, the old man declared himself ready to journey to the Indies if he could only come up with the object of his search, so they took the road to Rome; again too late, they proceeded to Parma, and there, to the inexpressible consolation of the venerable grammarian, he saw “his Petrarch,” and causing his son to lift him up, he reverently kissed the head that had conceived so many noble thoughts, and the hand that had written so much good Latin.[277] In one of his familiar epistles, Petrarch relates the story of a certain goldsmith of Bergamo who, having exchanged the pursuits of trade for those of literature, was possessed with such a passing great admiration of the author of the “Rime,” that he declared he should not die content unless he were once suffered to receive him in his house. Petrarch gave him that satisfaction but the delight of the goldsmith was so excessive, that his servants feared he would go mad with joy, and his guest had some difficulty in freeing himself from his troublesome attendance. Petrarch affected to treat these demonstrations of popular homage with studied contempt, but whilst he talked and wrote of the charms of solitude, it was evident that he was not a little intoxicated with the vapours of gratified vanity. Whatever pains he took to express his indifference to the world, he lost no opportunity of letting his friends know that the world was not indifferent to him. “Whenever I leave my house,” he wrote from Milan, “a thing that happens very rarely, I bow right and left, and stop to speak to no one. I am more esteemed here than I deserve, and far more than suits my taste for quiet. Not only do the prince and his court love and honour me, but the people respect me far beyond my merits, and love me without so much as seeing me, for I rarely appear in public.” His letters are filled with passages of this kind, which sufficiently betray that the would-be philosopher, who had written long treatises on the Solitary Life, and on Contempt of the World, was secretly devoured by a hungry egotism. His notions of the joys of Solitude attained to nothing more sublime than lying under a tree with a book in one’s hand, and no one would have been less pleased than he, if his admirers had taken him at his word and ceased to pester him. Yet the homage of the world had no power to soothe the restlessness that devoured him, and in the midst of all his outward successes, fortune failed not to deal him many a cruel blow. The great plague of 1348, which desolated all Europe, and which was so powerfully described by the pen of Bocaccio, carried off Laura de Sade among its first victims, and Petrarch recorded his sorrow on the blank leaves of his Virgil. Other losses followed, and in the midst of these private griefs, Petrarch, who had given his confidence to the celebrated Rienzi and had dedicated a noble sonnet to one whom he fondly trusted would have been the restorer of his country’s greatness, felt the fall of the great Tribune as a personal misfortune. “Some,” he exclaimed, “can still rejoice in riches, some in intellect, and some in health; but for me, I see not what anything in the world can henceforth give me, save tears.” A sad avowal for the greatest scholar of his age, but a scholar whose character, whatever may be said of his genius, was utterly hollow and superficial. The mere man of letters—and whatever may have been his sincere regret for the graver irregularities of his youth,—we must add, the unworthy ecclesiastic, ever sensible in the midst of his literary triumphs of a want and a weariness, is a poor exchange indeed, with all his erudition, for the race of Christian scholars with whom we have hitherto been engaged. His last residence was fixed at Arqua, near Padua; and there, on the 18th of July 1374, he was found dead in his study, with his head leaning on an open book. He had been struck by epilepsy, and so, as has been said, passed from the quiet of his library to the quiet of the grave. He had been the first to inaugurate a vast intellectual revolution, and the restoration of classical studies, begun by him, was carried on in the following century by Poggio and his contemporaries. For Italy, at least, the age of mediÆval darkness, had passed away for ever, and with it passed away also not a few of the old Christian traditions of thought, art, and taste. The mind of the coming generations was to be formed on pagan models, and from this time, as Hallam remarks, it became the main, if not the exclusive, object of an educated man, to write Latin correctly, to understand the allusions of the best classic authors, and to learn at least the rudiments of Greek. That the revived taste for ancient letters did eventually bring about a certain anti-Christian reaction in art and literature cannot be denied; and the character of many of those who became distinguished among the leaders of the Renaissance was such as scarcely entitled them to be numbered among “Christian Scholars.” Yet it would be most unfair to include under any sweeping censure all those who originated, or took part in, the classical revival, or to suppose that the movement was exclusively favoured by an irreligious party. The Augustinian friars and the Camaldolese monks of Florence were among the first encouragers of the new studies; and one of the earliest institutions of the nature of a literary academy, was that established in the Augustinian convent of the Holy Spirit at Florence. This convent adjoined the house where Giannozzo Manetti, then a mere boy, resided; and he contrived to make a door through the partition wall, by means of which he was able to enter the convent whenever he liked, and attend the conferences on literary subjects held among the brethren; the subjects of which were every day posted up in some conspicuous part of the cloister. Among the Camaldolese the same studies were introduced even before the death of Petrarch, and the monks of St. Mary of the Angels had among them men like Zenobio Tantino, who corresponded with all the literati of the day in poetical epistles. So heartily did they take part in the literary movements of their times that Ambrose Traversari, of whom Roscoe says that he had the best pretensions of any man of his age to the character of a polite scholar, was exclusively given up by his superiors to learned pursuits for the space of thirty years. Some, indeed, were to be found who dreaded the possible effects of reviving the study of Gentile writers, and it was scruples such as these which drew forth a graceful reply from Coluccio Salutati, the friend of Petrarch and the learned chancellor of Florence, whose achievements as a Latin poet won him the laurel wreath which was placed, not on his brow, but on his coffin, and whose unblemished life secured him a yet nobler reward in the friendship of St. Antoninus of Florence. He justly protested against the narrowness of supposing that a man could not be walking in the ways of God because he read the poets, and argued that in literature, as in all besides, we may find God, because all Truth and all Beauty is from Him, and to Him alone are they to be referred. That the restoration of good models, those same models which, as the historian Socrates informs us,[278] had been studied by Christians from the very first centuries of the Church for the sake of grace of elocution and the culture of the mind, was in itself lawful and desirable, does not appear a point requiring proof. Nevertheless, it is evident that the revolution effected in the studies of Christendom by the introduction of this new element, was one which demanded very powerful safeguards both on the side of faith and morals; and falling, as it did, under the direction of a race of captious and greedy professors, it resulted at last in grievous excesses which threatened little short of an extinction of Christian ideas altogether.

Already we begin to see the tide of learning dividing its waters into two streams, running in contrary directions. The close of the fourteenth century was illustrated, it is true, by a crowd of saintly men, who endeavoured to establish schools of sacred art and literature in the convents which they established or reformed. At Fiesole, St. Antoninus of Florence passed through his noviciate, in company with Beato Angelico, whilst, contemporary with them were St. Bernardine of Sienna, and St. John Capestran, the two Franciscan apostles, the former of whom drew half the Florentine grammar-masters to listen to his eloquence, while the latter terrified the fashionable ladies who thronged to his sermons into sacrificing their perfumes, dice, and false hair, of which he had the satisfaction of making several bonfires. An attentive study of the monuments, as well as of the literary history of the times, will, however, reveal significant tokens of the existence of a very different element from that which appears in the paintings of Angelico. It is remarkable that he formed no school, and found none to inherit his ideas. After his time, Christian art, the faithful exponent of the popular mind, daily lost something of the chaste severity of former times; there was a growing disposition in favour of more florid ornamentation in architecture, of a freer naturalism in painting, and of a capricious effeminacy even in sacred music, which destroyed the solemn religious character of the ancient chant. This latter abuse was severely reprehended by Pope John XXII. in his Bull, entitled Docta Sanctorum, wherein he complains of the innovations introduced by “certain disciples of a new school, who, employing their whole attention in marking time, endeavour, by new notes, to express airs of their own invention to the prejudice of the ancient chants.” In this, as in everything else, the mischief was chiefly effected by the professors, who were gradually assuming a sort of dictatorship in literature and the arts, and who, whether they lectured, sang, or painted, sought as their main object, not the solid instruction of their hearers, or the symbolism of divine truths, but merely the display of their own talents.

The literary movement did not at first extend itself very rapidly beyond the Alps, and in France particularly many circumstances combined to check for a time the progress of letters. King Charles V. had indeed a taste for the sciences, and founded a royal library at the Louvre containing 900 volumes, and forming what his accomplished biographer, Christine de Pisa, calls “une belle assemblÉe de notables livres moult bien escripts, et richement adornÉs.” She was the daughter of his Venetian astronomer, the authoress of fifteen volumes in prose and verse, and was, as Tiraboschi affirms, well acquainted with Greek. The king, however, found few among his courtiers to share his learned tastes. The knights and nobles who fought at CreÇy piqued themselves on their ignorance of letters as a sign of their gentle blood, and it is no uncommon thing to find a formula like the following attached to public deeds of the fourteenth century:—“Lequel a dÉclarÉ ne savoir signer, attendu sa qualitÉ de gentilhomme.” Eustache Deschamps, who wrote during the reigns of John and Charles V., bitterly complains of the ignorance of the upper classes as contrasted with those of an earlier generation. Formerly, he says, nobles studied the liberal arts until their twentieth year, before receiving knighthood; now they begin their education on horseback, abandon learning to men of meaner birth, and give themselves up to gaming and profligacy. He praises the older days of chivalry, when knights loved truth, virtue, and loyal love, and were not ashamed of being thought clerks, “car meilleur temps fut le temps ancien.” Alain Chartier, another writer of the same period, makes similar complaints. “Gentlemen live now,” he says, “as if they were only made to eat and drink; and everywhere you hear the ridiculous saying that it is unbecoming for a nobleman to know how to read and write. It used not so to be in the days when men held an ignorant king to be a crowned ass.” Nor are the accounts of the actual state of the University of Paris much more satisfactory. The schools were filled with teachers who introduced both philosophical and theological errors, and the Latinity of the Parisians is said to have been worse than that of their English neighbours. Discipline too was beginning to flag, and in 1366 the Faculty of Arts had to publish a decree of reformation, from which it appears that the regents had begun to open their schools at a later hour, and to introduce the hitherto unknown luxury of benches in place of the time-honoured bundles of straw. With the exception of a few great names, such as those of Gerson and Nicholas Oresme, this period is a dreary and barren one in the literary annals of France. And the sterility of her schools at this precise epoch is a remarkable and significant fact. It was exactly the period when the peculiar political doctrines of the Paris doctors appeared to have won their triumph. Adapting the principles of the old imperial jurisprudence to the circumstances of Christian Europe, if they did not actually identify the offices of Emperor and Pontiff, they yet put forth doctrines which virtually implied a species of royal supremacy. Gerson’s teaching on the same subject, if less absolute, was not more orthodox, and tended to make men regard the Pontifical dignity as a human thing which could be legislated for according to principles of human policy. National vanity came in to swell the pretensions of the Parisian doctors. France was the centre of Christendom, and the heart of France was the University. “Not Rome, but France,” said Nicholas Oresme, in his oration to Urban V., “is the country beloved by God. Charlemagne transplanted the liberal sciences from Rome to Paris, whose doctors may be compared to the stars of the firmament and the voice of many thunders; and on that holy soil, therefore, and not at Rome, ought the Pope to reside.” This sort of eloquence was continually reproduced in the treatises on the temporal and spiritual powers which poured forth from the pens of the Paris legists, who were the first to adhere to the Antipope, Clement VII., thus involving France in the guilt of the Great Schism, and whose influence, fifty years later, at the Schismatical Council of Basle, obtained the pretended deposition of Eugenius IV., and the election of another Antipope, Felix V. Nay, so thoroughly was the University of Paris in love with schism, that when, in 1438, King Charles VIII. ordered all his subjects to acknowledge the authority of Eugenius, she alone refused to obey: the Antipope had been a creature of her own fabrication, and she obstinately clung to his fortunes.

On schools which had thus deliberately cut themselves off from the source of benediction the blessing of fertility could not rest.[279] No dew fell on them, and it was as if the clouds had been commanded that they should rain no rain upon them. Moreover, the frightful wars that desolated France for 150 years were adverse to the spread of letters. In them even Protestant historians have recognised the marked and terrible retribution of sacrilegious crime. The long struggle between Philip le Bel and Pope Boniface VIII. terminated, in 1303, in what seemed the complete triumph of the Crown. Not only had Philip firmly asserted the independence of the temporal power, but to secure his victory he had calumniated the Vicar of Christ by accusing him before all Europe as a sorcerer, a heretic, an infidel, and a simonist. His two infamous satellites, William de Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna, had entered Anagni with the banner of France displayed, crying aloud, “Death to the Pope, and long live the King of France!” They seized the venerable old man of eighty-six, as he sat awaiting them, with passive courage, on his throne, with the cross in his hand and the tiara on his brow, and treated him with indignities which hastened, if they did not actually cause, his death. And then the seat of the Popes was transferred from Rome to Avignon, a calamitous event which weakened their independent power, and eventually plunged the Church into schism. Respect for the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff declined apace in the schools of France, and it became fashionable for her lawyers and doctors to discuss the question how far that authority extended, and to affix limits to it of their own devising. All this was doubtless a great victory, and seemed to be something very like the triumph of the secular over the spiritual power. But it was a triumph terribly avenged. At the time when these fancied successes crowned the daring policy of Philip le Bel, he was in the flower of his age, surrounded by his three sons, all inheritors of their father’s beauty, and promising to carry on the glories of his race to distant generations. But the King, in the forty-seventh year of his age, was killed by a wild boar; his sons, one by one, followed each other, heirless, to the tomb; at one and the same time the disgraceful crimes of their three wives were published to the world; and the crown passed from his family—and to whom? To the son of Charles de Valois, the friend and captain-general of Boniface VIII., who had refused to take part in his brother’s crimes, and always remained loyal to the injured Pontiff. But this was not all. A daughter of Philip le Bel still survived, the she-wolf of France, who, after dyeing her hands in the blood of her husband, King Edward II. of England, left to her son, Edward III., those fatal claims which brought upon France the outpouring of the cup of vengeance. Those golden fleurs-de-lys, which Dante had beheld borne in triumph through the gates of Anagni, were rolled and trampled in the dust for a century and a half by English descendants of that very king who had fondly thought to establish his royal power on the humiliation of the Vicar of Christ. France was brought to the very lowest abyss of ignominy, and had to witness the coronation in her capital of an English conqueror, who quartered those same dishonoured lilies on his shield. What more need be said? History teaches many lessons, but there is one which she repeats through all ages with unvarying fidelity. It is vain for the kings of the earth to stand up against the Lord and against His Christ. It is idle for them in their mad presumption to dash themselves against the Rock of Peter; for “whoso falls on that Rock shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall, it shall grind him to powder.”