[109] I have not met with More’s book, and am obliged to transcribe this from the Biog. Brit.
[110] Howes, in his Chronicle under date 1576, has thus narrated the story:—“A strange piece of work, and almost incredible, was brought to pass by an Englishman from within the city of London, and a clerk of the Chancery, named Peter Bales, who by his industry and practice of his pen contrived and writ, within the compass of a penny, the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, a prayer to God, a prayer for the queen, his posy, his name, the day of the month, the year of our Lord, and the reign of the queen: and at Hampton Court he presented the same to the queen’s majesty.”
[111] This was written in the reign of Elizabeth. Holyoke notices “virgin-perchment made of an abortive skin; membrana virgo.” Peacham, on “Drawing,” calls parchment simply an abortive.
THE ITALIAN HISTORIANS.
It is remarkable that the country which has long lost its political independence may be considered as the true parent of modern history. The greater part of their historians have abstained from the applause of their contemporaries, while they have not the less elaborately composed their posthumous folios, consecrated solely to truth and posterity! The true principles of national glory are opened by the grandeur of the minds of these assertors of political freedom. It was their indignant spirit, seeking to console its injuries by confiding them to their secret manuscripts, which raised up this singular phenomenon in the literary world.
Of the various causes which produced such a lofty race of patriots, one is prominent. The proud recollections of their Roman fathers often troubled the dreams of the sons. The petty rival republics, and the petty despotic principalities, which had started up from some great families, who at first came forward as the protectors of the people from their exterior enemies or their interior factions, at length settled into a corruption of power; a power which had been conferred on them to preserve liberty itself! These factions often shook, by their jealousies, their fears, and their hatreds, that divided land, which groaned whenever they witnessed the “Ultramontanes” descending from their Alps and their Apennines. Petrarch, in a noble invective, warmed by Livy and ancient Rome, impatiently beheld the French and the Germans passing the mounts. “Enemies,” he cries, “so often conquered prepare to strike with swords which formerly served us to raise our trophies: shall the mistress of the world bear chains forged by hands which she has so often bound to their backs?” Machiavel, in his “Exhortations to Free Italy from the Barbarians,” rouses his country against their changeable masters, the Germans, the French, and the Spaniards; closing with the verse of Petrarch, that short shall be the battle for which virtue arms to show the world—
| che l’ antico valore Ne gl’ Italici cuor non è ancor morto. |
Nor has this sublime patriotism declined even in more recent times; I cannot resist from preserving in this place a sonnet by Filicaja, which I could never read without participating in the agitation of the writer for the ancient glory of his degenerated country! The energetic personification of the close perhaps surpasses even his more celebrated sonnet, preserved in Lord Byron’s notes to the fourth canto of “Childe Harold.”