ERA OF COPERNICUS, TYCHO BRAKE, KEPPLER, AND GALILEO. 



o rule the nations with imperial sway, to impose terms of peace, to 

 spare the humbled, and to crush the proud, resigning it to others to 

 describe the courses of the heavens, and explain the rising stars ; this, to 

 use the words of the poet of the ^Eneid in the apostrophe of Anchises 

 to Fabius in the Shades, was regarded as the proper province of a 

 Roman. The genius of the people was even more adverse to the cultivation of the physical 

 sciences than that of the European Greeks ; and we have seen that the latter left experi- 

 mental philosophy chiefly in the hands of the Asian and African colonists. The elegant 

 literature and metaphysical speculations of Athens, her epics, dramas, histories, and orations, 

 had a numerous host of admirers in Italy, but a feeling of indifference was displayed to 

 the practical science of Alexandria. This repugnance of the Roman mind at home to ma- 

 thematics arid physics, together with the prevalence of its military despotism abroad, which 

 extended from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, from Northern Britain to the cataracts 

 of the Nile, annihilated in a measure the pure sciences in the conquered districts where 

 they had been pursued, and prohibited attention to them in the mother country. Long, 

 indeed, after the age of Ptolemy, the school in connexion with which he flourished, re- 

 mained in existence ; but, receiving no countenance from the imperial representatives, and 

 the iron yoke of arbitrary power prostrating the energies of the people, it gradually waned, 

 and was finally extinguished by the disorders that broke up the Roman empire. The 

 interval between the overthrow of ancient civilisation by the rude and warlike tribes 

 that took possession of its seat, and the revival of learning, exhibits an entire neglect 

 of the liberal arts, with the exception of the Arabs during the era of their power on the 

 banks of the Tigris in the Ea&t, and the Guadalquiver in the West. 



The brilliant career of these Children of the Desert, soon after their emergence from it, 

 was marked by an act, committed in the fever of fanaticism the destruction of the Alex- 

 andrian library, which betokened little the literary and scientific ardour of their descend- 

 ants. The event strikingly contrasts with that which occurred in the reign of Almamon, 



