Epitome of the Progress of jVatural Science. 153 



copyists. Cassiodorus, of whom we have before spoken, in his 

 work " De Institut. Divin. Litter." expatiates upon the pleasure 

 he found in this occupation. He enters into a great many curi- 

 ous details, by way of instruction to the monks in his favourite 

 art. He himself furnished drawings for the embellishment of the 

 manuscripts, which he caused to be carefully bound by able 

 workmen. When more than ninety years old, he drew up a 

 treatise on orthography for the use of the monks, i Amidst the 

 inestimable benefits which Christianity has conferred upon man- 

 kind, this atonement, which the monasteries made to letters for 

 the destruction they formerly had brought upon them, is one, to 

 the value of which, we cannot be insensible. 



At Constantinople, the seat of government of the Eastern Em- 

 pire, letters continued rapidly to decline. Under Justinian,* 

 whose code is well known. Theology became the reigning pas- 

 sion ; ecclesiastical literature absorbed the public attention, and 

 w^ords stood in the place of things. His ambition was to lead in 

 theology as in legislation, and he was not scrupulous in substitut- 

 ing physical for moral arguments. At the expence of the lives 

 of a hundred thousand of his subjects, he made war upon the 

 Samaritans of Palestine, a sect so unsettled in their doctrines, 

 that the Pagans considered them to be Jews, the Jews to be schis- 

 matics, and the Christians to be idolaters. The theological zeal 

 of this emperor, carried him at length to such refinements in his 

 speculations, that, like the pendulum, which when arrived at one 

 extreme point, is only preparing to return to the other, his 

 opinions oscillated over into heresy ; but happily, whilst he was 

 perparing to sustain his errors, by the same means he had used 

 to propagate his orthodoxy, he died. 



Pope Gregory the First,"]" one of the most learned men of his 

 day, but charged with carrying his zeal against Paganism to 

 lengths injurious to ancient literature, observes in one of his 

 letters, (Book 7th, let. 30,) " That there was not in Constanti- 

 nople, an uidividual capable of translating accurately from Greek 

 to Latin, or from Latin to Greek." 



Nothing could exceed the intellectual darkness that reigned 

 over the greatest part of Europe, when Charlemagne, in 774, 

 passed the Alps, and delivered Italy from the Lombards. At 

 Pavia, he found Peter of Pisa, from whom he received his first 

 * Flourished, A. D. 540. t A. D. 590. 



Vol. L-- 20. 



