A remarkable Century.

the remarkable century, out of which had broken the settlements on these shores, at the end of which they all had passed under British supremacy. That was the birth-time of our public life. From its great spirit, from its energetic and vivid experience, fell a splendor and a power on the embryo people which finally became the American Nation.

It was a munificent, a heroical century; in which, for the first time, the immense vigor of popular enthusiasm entered decisively into national development, and forced acceptance from statesmen and kings; which was, accordingly, the boldest in plan, the widest in work, the most replete with constructive energy, which up to that time had been known in Europe. Fruitful schemes, strenuous struggles, extraordinary genius, amazing achievement, the decay of authority, the swift advance of popular power--these so crowd the annals of it that no brief narrative could give a summary of them. Long repressed tendencies came to sudden culmination. Hidden forces found vast development. The exuberant and out-breaking energies of Christendom could no more be restrained within ancient limitations, than the lightnings, elaborated in hidden chambers of earth and sky, can be locked in the clouds from which they leap.

The invention of the movable type, a hundred years earlier, at Harlem or at Maintz, had made books the possession of many, where manuscripts had been the luxury of the few. Knowledge was distributed, and

thought was interchanged, on this new vehicle, with a freedom, to a breadth, before unknown. The founding of libraries, the enlargement of universities, had given opportunity for liberal studies; and the ancient world drew nearer to the modern, as the elegant letters of Greece and Rome made the genius and the action again familiar with which their times had been illustrious. At the same time, the discovery of this continent had expanded the globe to the minds of Europeans, and had opened new areas, the more exciting bccause undefined, to their enterprise and hope. The popular imagination, in the early part of that age, was stirred by tales of sea-faring adventure as it had never been by the wildest fiction. The air was full of romance and wonder, as savage forests, dusky figures, feathered crests, ornaments of barbaric gold, strange habitations, unheard-of populations, were lifted before the gaze of Europe, along the new Western horizon. Almost nothing appeared incredible. Grotius himself, scholar, jurist, statesman as he was, cautious by nature, and trained in courts, was inclined to believe in an arctic race whose heads grew beneath their shoulders. El Dorado was to Raleigh as real a locality as the duchy of Devon. Even Caliban and Puck seemed almost possible persons, in an age so full of astounding revelations.

But neither the magical art of printing, nor the discovery of the transatlantic continent, had stirred with such tumultuous force the mind of Christendom as

Influence of the Reformation.

had the sudden Reformation of religion, starting in Germany, and swiftly extending through Northern Europe. To those who accepted it, this seemed a revival of Divine revelations. It brought the Most High to immediate personal operation upon them. As in the old prophetic days, the voice of speech came echoing forth, from the amber brightness which was as the appearance of the bow in the cloud. The instant privilege, the constant obligation, of every man to come to God, by faith in His Son; the dignity of that personal nature in man for which this Son of God had died; the vastness of the promises, whose immortal splendors interpreted the cross; the regal right of every soul to communion, by the word, with the Spirit by whom that word was given :—these broke, like a flash from heights celestial, not only on the devout and the studious, but over the common life of nations.

Before the force so swiftly and supremely inspired, whatever resisted it had to give way. It not only released great multitudes of men into instant independence of the ancient dominant spiritual authority. It loosened the ligatures, or shattered the strength, of temporal tyrannies; and its impulses went more widely than its doctrines. In Italy and Spain, as well as in England, in the parts of Germany which retained their ancient allegiance to the Pontiff, as well as in those which had thrown this off, there was an unwonted stimulation in the air; and the forces, of learning,

of logic, or of arms, which fought against the Reformation, were themselves more eager and more effective because of the impulse which it had given.

Commerce was extending, as letters and liberties were thus advancing. Inventions followed each other almost as swiftly, with almost as much of startling novelty, as in our own time; and the ever-increasing consciousness of right, of opportunity, and of power, the sense of liberation, the expectation of magnificent futures these extended among the peoples, with a rapidity, in a measure, before unknown.

It was an age, therefore, not so much of destruction, as of paramount impulse to wide and bold enterprise. Vast hopes, vast works, imperial plans, were native to it. It was an age of detonating strife, but of study, too, and liberal thought; of the noblest poetry, the most copious learning, a busy industry, a discursive philosophy, a sagacious statesmanship; when astonishing discovery stimulated afresh magnificent enterprise; when great actions crowded upon each other; when the world seemed to have suddenly turned plastic, and to offer itself for man's rebuilding; when each decade of years, to borrow an energetic expression of Brougham, "staggered, under a load of events which had formerly made centuries to bend."

So far as the South of Europe is concerned, it is represented to us chiefly, certainly most pleasantly, by the great names, in literature or in fine art, by which it is distinguished; Tasso, crowned at Rome, and

Renowned Men of the Century.

Galileo, condemned;* Cervantes, Calderon, Lope de Vega, in Spain; Tintoretto, with his audacity of genius, and the lightning of his pencil; Cagliari, better known as Paul Veronese, Guido Reni, the Caracci; Velasquez, Murillo, and Salvator Rosa. It saw the close of Titian's life, and of Michael Angelo's. It saw the completion of the dome of St. Peter's.

In Northern Europe great clusters of names also shine on the century, of men preeminent in science, letters, or the fine arts; Kepler, Tycho Brahe; Moliere, Racine, Rochefoucauld, Pascal; Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyke, Claude Lorraine. Edmund Spenser, the 'Prince of Poets,' as his monument describes him, filled his career in it; Richard Hooker, Philip Sidney, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, John Selden, Isaac Casaubon. It bears upon its brow, as it moves in the great procession of historic periods, the dazzling diadem of the name of Shakespeare. It saw the youth of Leibnitz, and of Newton. It heard the music of Milton's verse. It saw the entire life of Descartes, the middle manhood of Spinoza. It watched Grotius from his birth to his burial, in the city of Delft.

* The traveler to Rome, visiting the church of S. MARIA SOPRĄ MINERVA, will hardly fail to feel the propriety of its name, if it is recalled to him that in one of the halls of the monastery attached to it, then occupied by the Inquisition, Galileo met his sentence, and pronounced his retraction: "I abjure, curse, and detest, the error and the heresy of the motion of the earth," etc. It startles one to remember that this was at as late a date as June 22, 1633; five years before Harvard College was founded. The Inquisition itself has since seen the truth of the more celebrated words which the aged philosopher is said to have uttered, in an under tone, when rising from his knees.