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manners of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the 

 spirit of love and adventure, so favourable, in many re- 

 spects, to poetry, music, and even to other arts.* 



The period in which the people of Christendom Avere 

 the lowest sunk in ignorance, and, consequently, in disor- 

 ders of every kind, may be fixed at the eleventh century, 

 about the reign of William the Conqueror. From that 

 aera, the sun of science beginning to re-ascend, threw out 

 many gleams of' light, which preceded the full morning, 

 when letters were revived, in the fifteenth century. The 

 Danes and other northern people, who had so long in- 

 fested all the coasts, and even the inland parts of Europe, 

 by their depredations, being settled in fertile regions, un- 

 der milder climates, had now learned the arts of agri- 

 culture, found a settled subsistence at home, and were no 

 longer tempted to desert their industry, in order to seek 

 a precarious livelihood by the plunder of their neigh- 

 bours. The feudal governments, also, among the southern 

 nations, were reduced to a kind of system. And though 

 that strange species of civil polity was ill fitted to en- 

 sure either liberty or tranquillity, it was preferable to the 

 vmiversal licence and disorder, which had every where pre- 

 ceded it. ' 



In the course of the century or two, next from Char- 

 lemagne, almost the whole allodial property of Europe 

 changed into feudal. Why and how this change took 



place, 



* The first romances were the production of the twelfth century. 



