ON THE REVIVAL OF LirERATURE- 



LECTURE XIII. 



ON THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE. 



In the last lecture, we continued our progress through that general 

 history of science and literature which we had commenced in the lecture 

 that preceded it ; and having, in the first of these studies, brought down 

 the subject from the most celebrated times of Athens and Rome to the 

 decline of the Roman empire ; we waded, in the second, through the 

 barren and cheerless period of the dark or middle ages, extending from 

 the fall of Rome before the barbarous arms of the Goths, in the fifth 

 century, to the fall of Constantinople before the no less barbarous arms 

 of the Turks, in the fifteenth century ; — exploring our way as well as we 

 were able, by the occasional guidance of a few transitory and uncertain 

 beacons, amidst the desolate realms of mental darkness and chaos by 

 which we were surrounded, till we reached the auspicious hour in which 

 the voice of the Almighty once more exclaimed throughout the dead and 

 dreary waste, " Let there be light! — and there was light." 



The period of the revival of letters in Christendom is, in many respects^ 

 one of the most brilliant eras in human history. Without the intervention 

 ■of a miracle we behold a flood at noon-day bursting all at once over every 

 quarter of the horizon, and dissipating the darkness of a thousand years ; we 

 behold mankind in almost every quarter of Europe, from the Carpathian 

 mountains to the Pillars of Hercules, from the Tiber to the Vistula, 

 waking as from a profound sleep to a life of activity and bold adventure ; 

 ignorance falling prostrate before advancing knowledge ; brutality and 

 barbarism giving way to science and polite letters ; vice and anarchy to 

 order and moral conduct ; and idolatry, hypocrisy, and superstition, to the 

 pure simphcity of Christian truth. Hence, in some places, we trace the fall 

 of feudal slavery and vassalage — in others, of popish tyranny and imposition 

 — and in every place, ajuster sense of relative duties and of the real dignity 

 of man. Hence, the origin of those important inventions, paper and 

 clock-making, printing, telescopes, and gunpowder ; and hence, too, the 

 first insight into the modern doctrine of the circulation of the blood ; and 

 the wonderful discoveries of the mariner's compass, the sphericity of the 

 earth's surface, and the revolution of the planets around the sun. Hence 

 Portugal, with a bold and adventurous canvass, doubled the Cape of Good 

 Hope, and realized a maritime passage to India ; Spain explored and 

 established herself in a new world ; and England, in the person of the 

 intrepid Drake, for the first time circumnavigated the globe ; while Gali- 

 leo, by the marvellous invention and application of his telescope, unfolded 

 to us not another world alone, but systems of worlds upon worlds in end- 

 less succession throughout the heavens ; all which astonishing series 

 splendid facts and transactions, together with various others of nearly 

 equal importance, crowd upon each other within the short period to which 

 we are now confining our attention, extending from the beginning of the 

 fourteenth to about the middle of the sixteenth century. The heart of 

 man seemed to beat with a new and more vigorous pulsation^ and all ther 

 energies of the soul to be roused to the proudest darings of adventure. 



In contemplating the causes of that Wonderful Qhange in the character 

 and pursuits of civilized Europe, which this extraordinacy combination ©f 



