high taste for classical learning. Poggio, the Florentine, the secretary of several of the popes, in his researches after the monuments of ancient erudition, discovered the works of Quinctilian, the history of Ammianus Marcellinus, and some of the compositions of Čicero. He wrote himself a history of Florence in the Latin tongue, remarkable both for excellence of matter and eloquence of expression. Laurentius Valla, Philelphus, Marcillus Ficinus, Nicolaus Perotus, Picus Mirandola, Palmerinus, and Angelus Politianus, are all worthy of notice, as uniting justness of historical reflection to a classical style and purity of expression.

But the taste for classical learning was at this time far from being universally diffused. In this respect the English and the French were very far behind the Italians. A curious proof of the scarcity of books in England in the fifteenth century, and of the great impediments to study, is found in the statutes of New College at Oxford. It was ordered by one of those statutes, that no man should occupy a book in the library above one hour, or two at most, that others might not be hindered from the use of the same. The famous library, founded in Oxford by that great patron of literature, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, contained only 600 volumes. About the commencement of the fourteenth century there were only four classics in the royal library at Paris. These were, a copy of some of the writings of Cicero, Ovid, Lucan, and Boëthius. The rest were chiefly books of devotion, many treatises of astrology and medicine, translated from the Arabic into Latin and French; pandects, chronicles, and romances. library was principally collected by Charles V. of France. the English became masters of Paris in 1425, the duke of Bedford sent this whole library, which consisted only of 850 volumes, into England, where part of it was probably the groundwork of duke Humphrey's library at Oxford. Even so late as the year 1471, when Louis XI. borrowed the works of the Arabian physician Rhasis, from the faculty of medicine at Paris, he not only deposited, by way of pledge, a great quantity of valuable plate, but was obliged to procure a nobleman to join with him as surety in a deed, by which he bound himself to return it under a considerable forfeiture.

This When

Thus low was the general state of literature during the greater part of the fifteenth century. But a brighter period was now at hand. The latter part of this century was the era of the entire dissolution of the bonds of barbarism. It was then that classical learning began to be universally diffused, and that a genuine taste was revived for polite literature, and for the productions of the fine arts. The dispersion of the Greeks, upon the total fall of the Eastern empire, and the refuge and welcome, which many of the learned and ingenious of that country found among the Italians, effected very soon a surprising change upon the face of all Europe.

The more pleasing philosophy of Plato began to supersede the scholastic subtleties of Aristotle, and the court of Rome became the seat of elegance and urbanity. Nicholas V., about the year 1440, established public rewards for compositions in the learned languages, appointed professors in the sciences, and employed intelligent persons to traverse all Europe, in search of the classic manuscripts buried in the monasteries. Of the succeeding age of Pope Julius II., and his successor Leo X., and of the splendor to which the fine arts then attained, I shall, in its proper place, take particular notice.

The circumstance which, of all others, most conduced to the advancement and universal dissemination of learning at this period, was the admirable invention of the art of printing. Printing seems to have been invented about the year 1440, at Strasburg, by John Guttenburg, but considerably improved by John Faust and Peter Schaeffer. This noble invention was, at its first appearance, deemed so extraordinary, that the servants of John Faust, who came to Paris to sell some of his early publications, were accused of magic, and the parliament ordered all their books to be committed to the flames. It must be owned, however, to the honor of Louis XI., that he condemned this decision of the Parisian judges, and ordered the value of the books to be paid to their proprietors. What inestimable advantages has mankind derived from this glorious art! The scanty gleanings that at this day remain to us of the wisdom of the ancients, serve only to make us regret what we feel we have undoubtedly lost of their knowledge beyond the possibility of recovery. But the art of printing gives us security for the perpetuation of the progress of the sciences in all future ages, and for their extensive circulation; a perfect assurance, that amidst all the vicissitudes in the fate of empires, no period of barbarism can ever arrive when any of the useful, or even of the polite arts, can again suffer a total extinction.

In this account of the revival of learning, and of its progress from its first appearance amid the darkness of the barbarous ages to the end of the fifteenth century, dramatic composition, which forms no inconsiderable part of polite literature, must not be forgotten.

The first dramatic representations known in Europe were devotional pieces, acted by the monks, in the churches of their convents, representative of the life and actions of our Savior and of his apostles. In England, these representations were termed mysteries, and sometimes miracles and moralities. They were brought into use about the twelfth century, and continued to be performed in England even to the sixteenth century. There is, in the reign of Henry VIII., a prohibition by the bishop of London, against the performance of any plays or interludes in churches or chapels. Perhaps, at this time, profane stories hat

begun to take place of the sacred mysteries: it is certain, at least, that these sacred mysteries themselves often contained great absurdities and very gross indecency.*

Profane dramas succeeded the sacred mysteries: they seem to have been known in France at an earlier period than in England; for about the year 1300 we find frequent mention of farçeurs, jongleurs, and plaisantins, qui divertissaient les compagnies par leur comédies:" and what made a very extraordinary mixture, these farçeurs very often joined sacred and profane history in the same representation. In one of these dramatic pieces which commemorates the scripture story of Balaam, six Jews and six Gentiles are introduced, conversing on the nativity of our Saviour; and among the latter is the poet Virgil, who speaks several monkish verses in rhyme.

Dramatic representation in Italy, appears to have been of the same nature, in these periods, with what we have seen it in France and in England. In Spain, where learning and good taste have not since made proportional advances with the rest of Europe, dramatic representation, till the age of Charles V., was confined entirely to such rude and farcical debasements of the scripture histories as we have already mentioned; and even at this day such absurd performances are not entirely disused. But the patronage of Cardinal Ximenes drew forth a few sparks of genius from the general obscurity; although it was not till the end of the sixteenth century that Lope de Vega and Calderon produced those regular compositions for the stage which have stood their ground to the present day, and are confessedly the masterpieces of dramatical composition among the Spaniards.

*In one of them, which is entitled a "Play of the Old and New Testament," Adam and Eve are introduced upon the stage naked, and conversing in very strange terms about their nakedness. Mr. Warton has given a curious account of this play in his History of English Poetry. In some of the first scenes of this play, God is represented creating the world: He breathes life into Adam, leads him into Paradise, and opens his side while sleeping Adam and Eve appear naked in the garden, and not ashamed, and the Old Serpent enters lamenting his fall. He converses with Eve: she eats of the forbidden fruit: they are cursed by God the Serpent exit hissing: they are driven from Paradise by the Cherubim, with a flaming sword,-and Adam then appears digging the ground, and Eve spinning.

CHAPTER XVII.

View of the Progress of Commerce in Europe before the Portuguese
Discoveries.

THE last chapter shortly delineates the progress of literature in Europe, from the first dawning of knowledge, which we owed to the Arabians, to the end of the fifteenth century, when from the discovery of the art of printing, learning and the sciences underwent at once a most astonishing improvement. The useful arts kept pace with the sciences; and this period, at which we are now arrived, was, in particular, remarkable for the singular advancement of navigation by the Portuguese, and those discoveries which produced the greatest effects upon the commerce of all the European nations. Previous, however, to giving an account of these discoveries, it is necessary to take a connected view of the progress of commerce in Europe, and its state during several of the preceding ages down to this period of its vigorous advancement at the end of the fifteenth century.

Nothing can show in a stronger light the small knowledge which the ancients possessed of the habitable globe, and the very limited communication which subsisted between different regions, than the opinion which universally prevailed of the earth's being uninhabitable, both in the torrid and in the frigid zones. This belief was not confined to the vulgar and illiterate : even the most learned and best informed of the ancients, and that too, in a very enlightened age, had no better notions of the actual state of the habitable globe. Cicero, in his "Somnium Scipionis," introduces Africanus thus speaking to Scipio the younger "You see this earth encompassed or bound in by certain belts or girdles, of which the two which are most distant and opposite are frozen with perpetual cold. The middle one, and the largest of all, is burnt up with the sun's heat. Two only are habitable; the people in the southern one are antipodes to us and with them we have no communication." Not to mention the poets, as Virgil and Ovid, Pliny the naturalist and Strabo the geographer, have both delivered the same opinion. We may guess from this, how small a portion of the habitable globe was really known to the ancients. From Monsieur D'Anville's very accurate maps of ancient geography, we see that the limits of the whole surface of the earth supposed to be known to the ancients,

extend no further than from the tenth degree of north latitude to the seventieth; but, in fact, the greatest part lying even within these boundaries was perhaps only guessed at; nor can we say that the ancients were intimately acquainted with any other regions than what lay between the tropic of Cancer, and the fifty-fifth, or at most the sixtieth degree of north latitude. To the south, in Africa, the researches of the ancients, if we except the voyage of Hanno, did not extend far beyond the provinces which border upon the Mediterranean, and those on the western shore of the Red Sea, or Sinus Arabicus. To the north, they were almost totally unacquainted with those extensive countries-Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, Poland, and the immense empire of Russia. Britain was not known to be an island till it was circumnavigated in the reign of the emperor Domitian.

The Ultima Thule is generally believed to have been one of the Shetland Isles. It does not appear that the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, or Greeks, had ever been within the Baltic Sea. The Romans, indeed, penetrated into it, but never ascertained its limits, or knew that it was bounded by the land. Of the continent of Asia, till the time of Alexander the Great, the Greeks and Romans knew little more than what lies between the Persian Gulf and the western coast of the Caspian Sea. Those immense tracts which were termed Scythia and Sarmatia were hardly otherwise known than by name. Even when geography had attained to the highest perfection to which it ever arrived in the ancient world, which was in the second century after the Christian era, when Ptolemy published his description of the globe, the sixty-third degree of latitude bounded the earth to the north; the equinoctial limited it to the south; to the east, all beyond the Ganges, was but conjectural. One fact recorded by Strabo affords a very striking proof of the great ignorance of the ancients with respect to the situation even of those kingdoms with which they had intercourse. When Alexander the Great marched along the banks of the Hydaspes and Acesina, two rivers which fall into the Indus, he observed that there were many crocodiles in those rivers, and that the country produced beans of the same species with those which were common in Egypt. From these circumstances he concluded that he had discovered the source of the Nile, and prepared a fleet to sail down the Hydaspes into Egypt. In Europe, many even of those countries, which lie between the fiftieth and sixtieth parallels of north latitude, were very imperfectly known to the Romans. What are now called the Netherlands are generally supposed to have been then in a great measure uninhabitable, and the face of the country to have been covered with woods and morasses. In the island of Zealand, indeed, the Romans seem to have had some establishment; and particularly in the island of Walcheren; near to the city of Middleburg, there were discovered the remains of a Roman temple dedicated to the