But, on the other hand, independent sovereignty, irrespective of political forms, was of primary importance to the encouragement of mental cultivation. The separation of Italy into a multitude of petty states converted almost every town into a capital, which its rulers and its citizens took equal pride in decorating. The patriotism thus generated was intense in proportion to the narrow field on which it was exercised, and an expenditure, restrained by severe sumptuary restrictions, found scope on monuments honourable to the public. Thus there ensued, between hostile communities and emulous factions, a rivalry in arts as in arms, whereby public institutions prospered, and individual genius was encouraged. Fanes, whose glories seem to defy the waste of time, were thus raised for the devotional requirements of the people; palaces grew up the bulwark of their liberties; citadels were fortified to rivet their chains; and even when the ultimate results were fatal to freedom, the talent and activity thus stimulated were sure to eventuate in industrial progress, as well as in the restoration of letters and the improvement of art.
The human mind, when aroused from its long and leaden slumbers, at first instinctively leaned for support upon such vestiges of ancient learning as had survived the wreck of ages. To excavate and examine these was the laborious task assumed by early students, in which Petrarch and Boccaccio sedulously joined. But, justly appreciating them as materials on which to found a new fabric, rather than as the substitutes for original thought, "the all-Etruscan three" happily combined enthusiasm for classic models with the power to rival them in a language simultaneously matured by themselves for the daring undertaking. The fifteenth century arrived; it was an epoch of reaction; one of other tendencies and tastes, when genius, as Ginguené has happily observed, was superseded by erudition. Entering the path which Petrarch had partially explored, its pioneers neglected the better portion of his example. They spent their energies in rummaging obscure recesses of monastic libraries, and wasted time and learning in transcribing, collating, and annotating the various manuscripts which thus fell within their grasp. In exhuming and renovating these monuments of a long-buried literature, they were forgetful of the fact that their dealings were with dead corpses; and whilst submitting the recovered fragments to philological analysis, they perversely sought to embody their own souls in these decayed members. As such materials were incapable of being reanimated, or even remodelled into more apt forms, this unnatural union was seldom effected without violence to the sentiment. Even the ablest writers devoted themselves to the arid task of scholia and translations, composing in the dead tongues such original works as they attempted. The result was a monstrous metempsychosis, whereby thought, enchained in uncongenial bodies, lost its due influence, and appeared in, at best, an unseemly masquerade. Hence the language of the century was Latin, its manner pedantic, its spirit coldly artificial.
But whilst the historian of that age laments the shackles thus imposed upon its literature, it were unjust to withhold from it the merit of preserving those treasures of ancient history and philosophy, eloquence and poetry, which, under happier auspices and more judicious treatment, have elevated thought, enlarged intellect, and enriched the style of later times. Although unable to refine the true metal from its dross, the pedants of "fourteen hundred" were miners who discovered the precious ore, and ascertained its component ingredients. The fashionable ardour for collecting early MSS. of ancient authors was very generally accompanied with untiring perseverance in mastering their intricacies. Philology and grammar thus grew into sciences, and their professors held the keys of human erudition. Deep ought to be our gratitude for the contingent of classical literature rescued from a rapid destruction by such arduous and self-denying labours; and a history of these discoveries, and of the zeal and enterprise volunteered by the early commentators and publishers of the ancient authors, would form an interesting monument of undaunted and generally successful diligence. Yet, in a comprehensive view of the results springing from these new tendencies, it is impossible to blind ourselves to the evils that emanated from them. From the nerve, grandeur, and elegance of Greek and Roman writers, there was much to learn with advantage; but their influence was directly antagonist to the highest sentiments of a Christian, and, in the main, a devotional people. When tried by such a test, their philosophy was hollow, their heroism selfish, their refinement corrupted. Nor was it only by reproducing the themes and the philosophy of distant ages that classicism clogged the elasticity of reviving literature. By inculcating extinct languages as the only means fitted for expressing their ideas, Italian literati checked the progress of their vernacular tongue,—that best bulwark of nationality,—and at the same time impeded the free expansion of thought, which, thus conducted into artificial channels, could but stagnate or freeze. The mind, habituated to find in literature a restraint, came to regard natural feeling as a solecism, living images as incongruous anomalies, warmth of sentiment as a blemish sedulously to be avoided. Under such false training, knowledge received the impress of a languid conventionality; and even those who condescended to write in Italian, chilled their compositions with the pedantry of antique idioms. The classic style thus introduced had many inherent defects. Borrowed plumage is seldom becoming, and servile imitations are always bad. Besides, the ancient type had been originally modelled by a people, and in an age, little sympathetic with those for whom it was now reproduced, and whose sentiments were cramped equally by the conventionalisms of an obsolete manner, or by the adoption of a dead tongue. Hence is it that the fifteenth century, so signalised by the diffusion of knowledge, and the advance of the fine arts, has bequeathed to us fewer eminent writers than those which immediately preceded and followed it, and that during its course Italian literature was unquestionably retrograde.
This is especially true of poetry, in an age of erudition when learning was essentially prosaic. The collation of manuscripts, the construction of grammars, the mastering of idioms, the revived subtleties of Greek dialectics, were ponderous studies with which the taste for literature of a lighter and more elastic tendency could ill assimilate. The chords whence Dante had evoked majestic notes, that seemed to swell from higher spheres, lay silent and unstrung; the lyre of Petrarch was left in feebler hands.
Nor was this the only evil resulting from an excess of the classical mania. Languages in which Christianity had not been naturalised were ill adapted for the expression of revealed truth; and the new scholarship, discarding the barbarisms of monastic Latin, imported into theological as well as profane compositions, the phrases of a pagan age. To find the personages of the Trinity, or even the hagiology of Rome, familiarly discussed under mythological names, is to us merely absurd and revolting;[*66] but when men, already imbued with classical predilections, were accustomed to mix up in words the objects of their worship with the demigods of their admiration, the natural consequence was a confusion of ideas nowise favourable to the maintenance of their faith or the purity of their morals.
A not less prejudicial element emanated from the revived philosophies of Greece, which now arrested attention and divided the speculations of learned men. That derived from Aristotle, and known to Europe through the sages of Arabia, had long occupied the cloisters, where alone mind was then exercised, or its operations studied. The rival system of Plato came directly from its native soil; and was first publicly taught in Italy early in the fifteenth century, by Gemistus Plato,[*67] of Constantinople. It attracted the notice of Cosimo Pater Patriæ, who after having Marsilio Ficino, son of his physician, grounded in its mysteries by Greeks of learning, placed him at the head of an academy in Florence, instituted by himself for the dissemination of its doctrines. From thence these radiated, absorbing the attention of literary men, and enlisting many converts from the Stagirite faith. Aristotle and Plato became the watchwords of contending sects,[*68] and the usual jarring results of such logomachy were not long wanting. The merits of a question, at first exaggerated by its respective zealots, were lost sight of in the torrent of abuse which gradually superseded argument, and inflamed every evil passion. Far overleaping the legitimate limits or literary warfare, disputant logicians advanced from replies to libels, from words to blows, and, after exhausting the armoury of invective, had recourse to the dagger. But on a subject so painful we are not called to enter. Backed by the authority of Nicholas V., the zeal of Cardinal Bessarion, and the example of the Medici, the sublime and imaginative speculations of Platonism for a time prevailed over the more material system of the Stagirite, and Florence became their head-quarters. The human mind, unaided by revelation, has never invented any system so abstractly beautiful, so pure in its morals, so elevating in its conceptions, so harmonious in its conclusions. Its lofty ethics rank next to the doctrines of inspiration, for it taught that happiness is the natural result of virtue, and that the mischiefs entailed by the passions are ill repaid by their transient pleasures. Yet, though thus intrinsically calculated to ennoble and refine the heart of fallen man, the Platonic theories indirectly led to lamentable results, both to the religion and the morality of the age. The divine revelation was by them virtually superseded, and paganism, from an affectation, became a conviction, or, at the least, a prevailing fashion, warping the manners and phrases, the faith and spirit of the age. Men lived for the present world by the light of human reason, until they forgot or denied a future existence, and a holier wisdom. The first blow struck at this practical heathenism came from Paul II., a Venetian, who was behind the age in its knowledge, as well as in its extravagances, and who relentlessly persecuted what he had not the capacity to redargue. Mind was, however, no longer to be silenced by papal bulls, or trammelled by penal fetters: it regarded the use of such weapons as proof that the spiritual armoury contained none more serviceable, and learned to demur to an ecclesiastical despotism it already loathed. Succeeding pontiffs disavowed the policy of Paul: but the old respect for the papacy was shaken; doubts arrayed themselves against dogmas, cavilling superseded blind faith, until the dissolute example set by the courts of Innocent, Alexander, and Leo, converted scepticism into infidelity, apathy into open aggression. It is impossible to contemplate the great talents, the unwearied application, absorbed by these rival systems of philosophy, without a sigh that they should have been wasted on inquiries so purely speculative; yet, it cannot be denied that the controversy prepared weapons that have since done good service in many a better cause; that it developed mental energies, and matured intellectual discipline, from which the world continues largely to benefit.
Although the revival of letters had been advancing during several generations ere the chiefs of Montefeltro sought other laurels than those of the battle-field, it was reserved for these princes to contribute no mean aids towards their full development in that golden harvest which the fifteenth century saw gathered in. Indeed, the concurrent testimony of all writers has claimed for the sovereigns of Urbino a foremost place among the friends of literature. In the words of the general motto of this work, which well condense the prevailing opinion, "it is notorious beyond question even of the malignant, that the house of Montefeltro and della Rovere has for a long time past been that which [most] shed a lustre upon Italy by letters, arms, and every sort of rare worth, and that the court of Urbino may be termed a Pegasean spring, in the language of historic truth rather than of poetic hyperbole." It was to the successive reigns of Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo I. that such expressions were generally applied, and to them our attention will now be directed; but in a future portion of this work we shall endeavour to maintain for their della Rovere successors a similar reputation.
Were we to estimate the celebrities of Urbino by the encomiums of their partial countrymen, and measure their claims upon mundane immortality by the standard set up by Baldi Lazzari, Grossi, Cimarelli, and Olivieri, it would become our indispensable duty to add at least a volume to the present work. But these authors were deeply imbued with that peculiarly Italian patriotism which, narrowing its sympathies within the limits of a township or a petty state, enshrined provincial mediocrity in a temple of fame modelled upon a scale of national splendour. Believing that the dignity of their little fatherland depended upon the notices of its existence which they could worm out of antique memorials, however doubtful in authority, and upon the number of notable names they could connect with its localities, they tasked themselves to this investigation with industry worthy of a nobler and more useful object. Many folio volumes, ponderous in their contents as in their material, were the result; but they preserve only laborious trifling, a harvest of wordy conclusions gleaned from a soil barren of tangible facts, dissertations which may be summed up in the axiom ex nihilo nihil fit, "nothing comes of nought." Like those of the northern senachies, their themes were often legendary or invented, and it would have been scarcely a loss to literature had these productions been equally fugitive. Should the worthies mentioned in the following chapters seem scarcely to maintain the literary renown of Urbino, our readers ought in justice to remember that scarcely a tithe has found place in our pages of those whom zealous eulogists have placed upon the roll of Italian literati, but