ON THE MIDDLE OR DARK AGES. 



311 



riches ; that has annihilated their population ; that has destroyed their laws, 

 their manners, and their national spirit. The poison has sprung from them- 

 selves ; it has risen indigenously, and has destroyed everj^ thing."* 



Of the little genuine learning that appeared in Christendom, to temper the 

 gross ignorance of the times, it is to the praise of the Church that by far the 

 greater part of it, both in the eastern and western empire, was the rare boast 

 of ecclesiastics. And it is especially to the praise of our own country, and 

 peculiarly to that of our very ancient universities, both which can lay claim 

 to an origin coeval with the middle period of the Anglo-Saxon octarchy, that 

 more than half the most celebrated scholars of the times were of British 

 birth and education. Such were Aldhelm, Bede, and Alcuin, the three great 

 Anglo-Saxon luminaries of the eighth century, and the last of whom was the 

 tutor and confidential friend of Charlemagne. Such was Ingulph of the 

 eleventh century, made abbot of Croyland by William the Conqueror, and to 

 whose history we are indebted for much that has descended to us of the era 

 we are now surveying. Such, too, were John of Salisbury, Girald the Cam- 

 brian, and the monks Adelard and Robert of Reading ; the two last of whom 

 had travelled into Egypt and Arabia, and had studied mathematics at Cordova; 

 and the former of whom translated Euclid out of Arabic into Latin; a clear 

 proof, however, that Greek, the language in which Euclid himself wrote, was 

 but little known at this time among men of letters in England. Such also 

 was Roger Bacon, of the thirteenth century, whose knowledge of physics 

 had so far outstripped that of all his contemporaries that, like Petrarch some 

 ages afterward, his wonderful attainments were ascribed to magic, and his 

 holding an intercourse with the Devil. And such, to close the list, was 

 Wycklitf, in the fourteenth century, the bright and splendid phosphor of the 

 glorious Reformation. 



These, and as many more, had I time to enumerate them, were furnished 

 from the Church. Nor has the laity any reason to be ashamed of its contri- 

 butions: Sir John Fortescue brilliantly adorned the fifteenth century. Sir 

 John Mandeville the fourteenth ; which was also enlightened by the combined 

 and powerful talents of Gower and Chaucer, of Dante, Petrarch, and Boc- 

 cace. Henry L and Henry H. are nearly equally celebrated in the twelfth 

 century, for their patronage of learning and learned men, and especially for 

 their promoting the purest taste in Gothic architecture ; during whose reigns, 

 the most sumptuous and admired of our national buildings of this kind were 

 erected. The eleventh century is peculiarly signalized by the splendid 

 talents and learning of Egitha, queen of Edward the Confessor, who, in the 

 language of Ingulph, was equally admired for her beauty, her literary accom- 

 plishments, and her virtue. Let us ascend a century higher, and close the 

 vhole with the sacred name of Alfred ; a name, no Englishman ought to pro- 

 nounce without homage : equally tried and equally triumphant in adversity 

 end prosperity ; as a legislator and philosopher ; as a soldier and politician ; 

 a king and a Christian; the pride of princes; the flower of history; and the 

 delight of mankind. 



We have thus rapidly travelled over a wide and dreary desert, that, like the 

 sandy wastes of Africa, to which we have just referred, has seldom been 

 found refreshed by spots of verdure, or embellished by plants that should 

 naturally belong to the country: — and what is the upshot of the whole? — 

 the moral that the survey inculcates ? — Distinctly this ; — a moral of the utmost 

 momfiit, and imprinted on every step we have trodden; — that ignorance is 

 ever associated with wretchedness and vice, and knowledge with happiness 

 and virtue. These connexions are indissoluble; they are inwoven in the 

 very texture of things, and constitute the only substantial difference between 

 man and man. For, if we except these distinctions, " all men," observes 

 one of the most enlightened writers of this dark period, to whom I have al- 

 ready adverted, John of Salisbury, who was contemporary with Stephen and 

 Henry H., and whose classical Latin I shall put into literal English, " all 



* De la Litt6rature du Midi de I'Europe, torn. i. Paris, 4 torn. 1813. 



