subduing influence of her spell, blending strangely with every excess of violence and every outburst of superstition. Of an Irish chieftain -the most ferocious that ever defied the English power-it is related, amid a legion of horrible crimes, that, ‘sitting at meat, before he put one morsel into his mouth, he would slice a portion above the daily alms, and send it to some beggar at the gate, saying it was meet to serve Christ first.' The monastic bodies that everywhere arose, were an invaluable counterpoise to military violence; pioneers in most forms of peaceful labor; green spots in a wilderness of rapine and tumult, where the feeble and persecuted could find refuge. As secure repositories for books, when libraries were almost unknown, they bridged the chaos of the Middle Ages, and linked the two periods of ancient and modern civilization. The Church peopled the imagination with forms of tender beauty and gentle pathos, which—more than any dogmatic teaching-softened and transformed the character, till it learned to realize the sanctity of weakness and the majesty of compassion. The lowliness and sorrow of her Founder, the grace of His person, the agonies of Gethsemane or of Calvary, the gentleness of the Virgin Mother, are the pictures which, for eighteen hundred years, have inspired the hearts of men with an impassioned love, formed the governing ideals of the rudest and most ignorant, furnished the highest patterns of virtue and the strongest incentives to its practice. Here, in the character and example of the crucified Nazarene, Christianity finds an enduring principle of regeneration, by which, though shrouded by disastrous eclipse or dimmed by passing mist, her light is never quenched,-by which, when luxury, ambition, worldliness and vice have wounded her wellnigh to death, she has renewed her strength like the eagle, has run and not been weary, has walked and not been faint. So has her mightiest apology, from age to age, been lives of holiness and fidelity; and never, though she seemed to be dying, has she lacked such. Side by side with those who lived and schemed in ecclesiastical politics as their chosen element, were men to whom worldly honors were indifferent,-to whose meekness and selfdenial, more than to diadem, tiara, sword, or logic, she owes her empire over the human heart. Learning. From the age of Augustus, Latin and Greek learning which we call ancient or classical, sensibly declined, first by organic decay; and its downfall, begun by disease, was accelerated by violence. Libraries were destroyed, schools closed, and intellectual energy of a secular kind almost ceased, in the irruption of the Northern barbarians, who gloried in their original rudeness, and viewed with disdain arts that had neither preserved their cultivators from degeneracy nor raised them from servitude. A collateral cause of this prostration was the neglect, by the Christian Church, of Pagan literature. For the most part, the study of the Latin classics was positively discouraged. The writers, it was believed, were burning in hell. When a monk, under the discipline of silence, desired to ask for Virgil, Horace, or other Gentile author, he was wont to signify his wish by scratching his ear like a dog, to which animal it was thought the Pagans might properly be compared. The human intellect, sinking deeper every age into stupidity and superstition, reached its lowest point of depression about the middle of the eleventh century. On the survey of society, no circumstance is so prominent as the depth of ignorance in which it was immersed. It was rare for a layman, of whatever rank, to know how to sign his name. Contracts were made verbally. The royal charters, instead of the names of the kings, sometimes exhibit their mark the cross. In England, Alfred declares that he could not recollect a single priest who, at his accession, understood the common prayers, or could render a Latin sentence into English. The darkness which reigned far and wide was rendered unavoidable, among other causes, by the scarcity of books, whichas they were in manuscript form, and written or copied with cost, labor, and delay-could be procured only at an immense price. In 855, a French abbot sent two of his monks to the Pope, to beg a copy of Cicero's De Oratore, of Quintilian's Institutes, and some others; for, although we have part of these books, yet there is no whole or complete copy of them in all France.' In Spain at the beginning of the tenth century one and the same copy of the Bible often served different monasteries. In 1299, the bishop of Winchester, borrowing a copy of the Bible with marginal notes, gives a solemn bond for due return of the loan. A book donated to a religious house was believed to merit eternal salvation, and was offered on the altar with great ceremony. Sometimes a book was given to a private party, with the reservation, 'Pray for my soul.' When a book was bought, persons of consequence and character were assembled to make formal record that they were present on the occasion. It was common to lend money on the deposit of a book. In the universities were chests for the reception of books so deposited. Bede records that Benedict sold a volume to his sovereign Alfred for eight hides of land—about eight hundred acres. Moreover, when Latin ceased to be a living tongue, the whole treasury of knowledge was locked up from the eyes of the people. In this linguistic corpse were sealed the Scriptures, the liturgy, and the teachings of the Christian Fathers, and there they were tenaciously held. Through this venerable medium, as a learned language, the Church of Rome stood in an attitude strictly European, enabled to maintain a general international relation. Its prevalence was the condition of her unity, and therefore of her power. Thus, intent upon her own emoluments and temporalities, by guarding from the unlearned vulgar this key to erudition, she was yet the sole hope for literature. Learning was confined almost wholly to the ecclesiastical order. Manuscripts found secure repositories in the abbeys, which floated through the storms of war and conquest, like the Ark upon the waves of the flood; in the midst of violence remaining inviolate, through the awful reverence which surrounded them. The monastery became the one sphere of intellectual labor. Here with no craving for human fame, were composed the sermons and defences of mediæval faith, and the voluminous Lives of Saintsheroic patterns of excellence which each Christian within his own limits was endeavoring to realize. Here the monkish scholar, his hopes fixed upon the pardon of his sins and the rewards of the unseen life, pursued his studies in a spirit which has now almost faded from the world. In the deep calm and chilly barrenness of the Scriptorium-what the printing-office is to us-might be seen the sombre figures of the tonsured workmen, whose task it was, seated at the rude desks or tables, to copy and adorn, letter by letter, point by point, the precious manuscripts that filled the wooden chests ranged around the naked stone walls. With pen cil of hair, pen of reed or quill, and ink of many-hued splendors, the artist laid on colors and produced designs which for richness and beauty command our admiration; on papyrus or parchment, writing the headings in bright red; forming the initial letter of a chapter with a brilliant tracery, in scarlet and gold and blue lace-work, of intermingled flowers and birds; tracing in black the thick perpendicular strokes of the text-hand; then when the book is finished—which may be the work of years if the decora tions are minute and profuse, painting the title in scarlet, with the name of the copyist in colors at the foot of the last page, and a marginal embroidery of angelic and human figures, birds, beasts and fishes, flowers, shells and leaves. But as in the natural world every night brightens into a new morning, so in the spiritual the sun of science, having reached its nadir of decline, begins its reascension to the zenith, throwing out many premonitory gleams of light ere the dawn reddens into the lustre of day. The leading circumstances in the gradual renewal of European thought are the study of civil law, presaging progress in the science of government; the development of modern languages, with its taste for poetry and its swarm of lay poets; the cultivation, in the twelfth century, of Latin classics, quotations from which, however, during the Dark Ages, were hardly to be called unusual; the partial restoration of Greek literature-mathematical, physical, and metaphysical, which, with the exception of scattered instances where some 'petty patristic treatise' or later commentator on Aristotle was rendered into Latin, had been almost entirely forgotten within the pale of the Romish Church, but now in the eleventh century, imported across the Pyrenees into France from the Arab conquerors of Spain, glimmered with pulsation of — That earlier dawn Whose glimpses are again withdrawn, Lastly, as the special mark of that new fervor of study which sprang up in the West from its contact with the more civilized East, the institution of universities. From an early period, in England as well as elsewhere, there were schools, though in general confined to the cathedrals and monasteries, and designed exclusively for religious purposes. while the first ceased to be witnesses and became only judges of the testimony given. It was the abolition of the ordeal system in 1216 which led the way to the establishment of what is called a petty jury' for the final trial of the prisoner. Centuries were to pass, however, before the complete separation of the functions of juryman and witness should be effected. The 'Meeting of Wise Men' no longer retained, under Alfred, its character of a national gathering, as when the Saxons preserved in simplicity their Germanic institutions. Then all freemen, whether owners of land or not, composed part of it. Gradually, by the non-attendance or indifference of the people, only the great proprietors were left; and, without the formal exclusion of any class of its members, it shrunk up into an aristocratic assembly. After the Conquest, in the reign of John, the national council was a gathering, at the king's bidding, of all who held their lands. directly from the crown, both clerical and lay. It was like the 'Meeting of the Wise Men,' only more people sat in it, and they were the king's feudal vassals. Those who were entitled to be present, could only be present themselves—could not send representatives. At the county courts, groups of men sent from the various parts of the shire represented, in the transaction of business, the whole free folk of the shire. Slowly and tentatively this principle was applied to the constitution of the Great Council. Henry III and his barons alike ordered the choice of 'discreet knights' from every county, to meet on the common business of the realm.' In 1246, the word parliament was first used as the name of the council. The extension of electoral rights to the freeholders at large is seen in the king's writ of 1264, sent to the higher clergy, earls, and barons; to the sheriffs, cities, and boroughs throughout England, commanding the former three to come in person, the latter to send representatives. It was long, however, before the chosen deputies were admitted to a share in deliberative power. In 1295, Edward gathered at Westminster an assembly that was in every sense a national Parliament. It straightway fulfilled the sole duty of a Parliament in those days,-voted the king a supply. Two years later the one thing still wanting was gained,—a solemn acknowledgment by the king that it alone had power to tax the nation. The idea of |