In the estimation of minds ruled by the love of books, even if incapable of discriminating the precious from the worthless—the worthless, by a principle of association, partakes, to a large degree, of the respect that belongs in reason only to what is intrinsically valuable. A BOOK, whatever be its subject or its merits, is viewed with a fond covetousness by those whose passion it is to love books. This feeling must have been strong indeed in times when books were hardly to be purchased, and when their ideal value included a recollection of the toil of transcription. The spirit of the ruling superstition, which taught the attachment of an incalculable importance to objects intrinsically worthless, must also have favoured an undistinguishing reverence for books. We need not then be surprised to find that works of all classes, though altogether unsuited to the taste of the times, were reproduced, from age to age, by the monkish copyists.
While, therefore, all taste for instruction had disappeared from the face of society—while kings and nobles were often as ignorant as artisans and peasants, while even many of the clergy retained only some shreds of learning, the productions of brighter ages were still hoarded and perpetuated, and were made accessible to the few whose intellectual ardour carried them beyond the standard of their times.
The reader who would extend his acquaintance with the subjects so briefly referred to in this chapter will find the means of doing so amply supplied in the work of Mr. Maitland which so conclusively establishes the fact of the uninterrupted continuance of the intellectual life of Europe through those ages which too hastily have been spoken of by modern writers as times of universal ignorance.[4]
FOOTNOTES:
[4] The Dark Ages; a series of Essays, intended to illustrate the state of Religion and Literature in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth Centuries. By the Rev. S. R. Maitland, &c.
CHAPTER IX.
THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
More than half a century before the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, the learned men of that city, apprehensive of the approaching fall of the empire, had begun to emigrate into Italy, where they opened schools, and became the preceptors of princes and the guides of the public taste, which they directed towards the study of the classic writers of Greece especially, and even of Rome. But it was the fall of Constantinople in 1453 which filled the Italian cities with these learned strangers.
The Italians of that age needed only to receive this kind of direction, and to be aided by these means of study; for they had for some time been placed under those peculiar circumstances which have ever proved the most favourable to the advancement of the human mind. Throughout a number of independent states—crowded upon a narrow space, the same language, yet diversified by dialects, was spoken. The energy, the rivalry, the munificence that accompany an active commerce kept the whole mass of society in movement; while the influence of a gorgeous superstition, which sought to recommend itself by every embellishment that the genius of man could devise or execute, overruled the tendency of successful trade, and directed the ambition of princely merchants towards objects more noble and intellectual than are those which wealth usually selects as the means of distinction.
The formation of libraries, suggested or favoured by the abundant importation of manuscripts from Constantinople, was the means not only of making more widely known the works of those Greek authors which had never fallen into oblivion, but of prompting researches which issued in the recovery of the Latin writers also, many of whom had long been forgotten. The appetite for books having thus been quickened, neither cost nor labour was thenceforward spared in their accumulation; and learned men were despatched, in all directions, throughout Europe, western Asia, and Africa, expressly to collect manuscripts. In the course of a few years, most of the authors that are now known to us, were brought together in the libraries of Rome, Naples, Venice, Florence, Milan, Vienna, and Paris, where they were laid open to those who were best qualified to give them forth anew to the world.
Thus aided by the munificence and zeal of princes and popes, the scholars of the fifteenth century sedulously applied themselves to the discovery, the restoration, and the publication of the remains of Greek and Roman literature; and so it was that in the course of sixty or eighty years, most of the works now known had been committed to the press. Since that time some few discoveries have been made; but the principal improvements in classic literature, of later date, have consisted in the emendation of the text of ancient authors by means of a more extensive collation of manuscripts than the first editors had any opportunity to institute. This restoration of the remains of ancient works to their pristine integrity has not been effected, like that of a dilapidated building, or a mutilated statue, by the addition of new materials in an imagined conformity with the plan and taste of the original work; but by the industrious collection and replacement of the very particles of which it at first consisted.