Our Retrospect. 



noble inheritance in art and literature. We must not regard these 

 slightingly; we can only speak lovingly about them, for in almost 

 every department we are enjoying the results of their teaching. And 

 yet it seems to me a matter of little question that these results came 

 mainly from some instinctive impulse of the whole people, pressing 

 them forward toward their realizations of excellence in taste and art, 

 and were mostly attained through individual genius ; that there 

 was little spirit of actual organization for urging on the good work in 

 behalf of future generations ; and that, when the aesthetic longing of 

 the nation for beauty had at last been satisfied, there was only a 

 feeble impulse left in the life of the people toward any co-operation 

 of talent for purposes of merely inartistic and useful progression. 

 And it further seems to me that after the glories of the past had 

 been duly chronicled, even in their literature there was too large a 

 leaven of the teachings of certain captious philosophers of the day, 

 calling themselves the leaders of thought, but by whom nothing other 

 than useless abstractions seemed ever taught; drawing after them 

 through the sacred groves their trains of pupils all so weak in worship 

 of their chiefs as to give little heed to any promptings toward inde- 

 pendent theory; neglecting physical science for mystical disputations 

 about the unreal; inventing philosophies which with coming cen- 

 turies were superseded by other philosophies having foundations no 

 better laid, but which for the time were made more attractive with the 

 glitter of novelty, and leaving a record of argumentation not more solid 

 and improving than the silly speculations of the schoolmen of the 

 middle ages. Passing onward, we come to the more practical talent 

 of the Pontifices under the Roman Empire, entrusted by the govern- 

 ment with the care of the calendar and the due announcement of the 

 feasts and fasts and, perhaps, with the supervision of the public works. 

 With them, as an associate body, must have been collected much of 

 the advanced science of the period. Yet what do we read about them 

 which can encourage the supposition that they performed their duties 

 in any other than a perfunctory manner, stolidly using their ad- 

 vantages without any attempt to improve upon them, employing 

 in their duties any other than that superficial knowledge that 

 might have come down to them through the investigations of 

 former periods, and caring little about increasing the wisdom of 

 the world by original research or invention, so long as they could 

 feel assured that the information already stored up would serve the 

 purpose of their generation? There was the later association of the 

 Master Builders of the Middle Ages, united together by a bond of 

 secret fellowship, supposed by many to have been the originators of 



