into the Revival of Greek Literature in Italy. 405 



voluptuous country, had tamed the pride, and softened the bar- 

 barity, of the northern invaders. But the Lombards were in 

 every respect a different people. They broke into Italy from 

 their native settlements in Pannonia, while all the vigour and sa- 

 vage freedom of barbarism was yet fresh and unworn upon them, 

 and in their conquest of that kingdom, they treated the degene- 

 rate Romans with cruelty and contempt. 



" This ferocious nation," says St GREGORY, " is come upon us 

 " like a tempest, and, thundering on our defenceless heads, has 

 " ravaged our cities, levelled our fortresses, destroyed our mona- 

 " steries, and almost exterminated the inhabitants. Our fertile 

 " fields have no longer cultivators or proprietors, and places once 

 " populous are occupied and defiled by beasts, of prey **? f\: 



Greece was now the only country where the light of science 

 and of literature still remained unextinguished, and where the 

 knowledge of the works of antiquity was still cultivated with en- 

 thusiasm ; but Italy could not profit by this circumstance ; for, 

 to fill up the cup of her misery, an almost perpetual war subsist- 

 ed between the Lombards and the Greeks, and all hopes of a se- 

 cond dawn from this wonderful country, in whose literary histo- 

 ry there seems to have been no middle age of darkness, were thus 

 completely extinguished. 



The works of the philosophic BOETIUS, composed about the 

 beginning of the sixth century, independent of their own intrin- 

 sic beauty, acquire thus a reflected interest from the gloomy 

 period in which they were written, and, in their perusal, we truly 

 seem to listen to the latest sighs of the expiring literature of 

 Greece and Rome. 



* St GREGORY in his Exposition of the Prophet EZEKIEL. See BARONIUS apiid 

 HOWKI.S, vol. 8. The Translation is by the author of the Dissertation. 



