thirst of dominion, ambition, and, in later times, the desire of escaping from the consequence of debts, murders, or quarrels at home. It was a universal rejoicing. Those who went away, carried their aspiring hopes to a field where it seemed as if their golden dreams would fall short of reality; those who remained found themselves at ease, and bade the adventurers a hearty farewell. Meanwhile the feudal anarchy, that had threatened the western world with total dissolution, turned all its fury towards the East. Monarchs and barons sold their estates, titles, and privileges, with the eagerness of the dog in the fable, dropping the substance to run after the shadow.

No condition was too hard to get money for the holy armaments. Independence was publicly bought, or received gratuitously, or siezed upon by force, by a great number of cities, boroughs, and vassals. The crusades gave the first sanction to national liberty throughout all Europe. The signing of the Magna Charta by John of England, and the opening of the parliaments by Philip of France, are events contempora neous with the crusades, and in great part a consequence of that general convulsion. But the fairest advantages were obtained by Italy. The independence of the Italian republics, already so far advanced, was definitively sealed by the diversion to Palestine. Both the first and second Frederic, the most formidable enemies of Italy, were engaged in those sacred expeditions, and the country was freed from their menaces. The Lombards and Tuscans, as well as the rulers of the Two Sicilies, sent, in their turn, armies and fleets to Jerusalem, and the standards that had often met in the field for a mortal encounter, marched side by side to a common emprise, on terms of fraternity. And when the soldiers of the cross, mixing temporal with spiritual advantages, founded their ephemeral principalities in Syria, the Italian republics, with a maturer wisdom, laid the basis of a more solid settlement by their commercial factories and flourishing colonies on the shores of the Bosphorus and Asia Minor; from that early epoch engrossing and monopolizing all the commerce of the East. Hence all branches of industry were advanced to the highest prosperity by the general movement, which brought into contact the two ends of the globe. The mind expanded; the spirit of enterprise acted on a larger scale; voyages and discoveries began by land and sea. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem led the way to the Indies and America.

The soil itself of the west of Europe teemed with a growth of Eastern productions, and the Lombard plain smiled with a luxuriant harvest from exotic seeds. The literary light of the Eastern empire was among the noblest conquests. The crusaders were followed in their retreat by the wrecks of ancient Greek literature; and the dreams of Arabian poetry dazzled the more obtuse fancy of the West. The luxuries of Eastern refinement, the contemplative tastes and habits of that region, were gradually communicated to the active children of Europe, and mental power soon gained its advantage over bodily strength.

Such were the direct and immediate effects of the crusades on social life; but the impression they left upon the mind in after ages had more magical results. For, the human mind, when losing by degrees its energy for present exertion, returns with restless regrets to the fairy land of the romance of past ages and the good old times of chivalry ; and the crusades haunted the imagination of the Italian bards, the dearest theme of their inspiration, the most heart-thrilling chord of their harps. Thus the seeds of the institutions and learning of the ancient world survived the fate of the Roman empire, to bud forth through the general alluvion of the northern invaders, and acquire new vigor on a virgin soil better suited to their generous nature; the Christian religion warmed and developed what it found most noble in ancient thought or in modern feeling; and those three elements were so happily combined, that Rome, and her laws, letters, and arts, could not have been withdrawn from ruin, even by the new religion, without the material element of Northern strength, and the brute force of the North could not have been softened even by Christianity, without the enlightening element of old liberal institutions.

Thus Roman wisdom gave the intelligence, Northern bravery furnished the arm, Christianity formed the heart, and chivalry and the crusades were the practice of those theories, the result of those components, the living-out of those animating principles. Of all this great edifice of the Middle Ages, nothing seems to exist in our times. Feudalism yielded to the repeated attacks of despotism. The modern constitutions have pointed out a new system of civil liberty. To the extent of its own empire, French philosophy has razed to the ground religious devotion. Chivalry has long

since lain by the side of the helmets and corselets of its champions.

But is all the noble spirit of the Middle Ages equally prostrate and low? Is it so, is it desirable that it should be so ? We hope not. We think not. The solidity of the institutions of the men of those times partakes of the cement of their edifices and the temper of their armour. The Egyptians wrote on their pyramids; "We have spent years in building; we give you ages to destroy!

We shall conclude our task by a brief examination of the state of literature in Italy during the age of darkness, by pointing out what remained of ancient lore at the beginning of the new era of the Italian republics, and considering what influence the Northern, the Arabian, and Provençal poetry exerted upon the first period of modern Italian literature, the age of Dante.

The writings of Greece, and the writings of Rome, form but one literature in two distinct languages. Literature, in Rome merely a luxury, with few exceptions displayed little or no original character. It rose in days of ebriety and epicurism; it was made subservient to flattery and servility. As such, it could have no long duration. As soon as the amiable parasites of Augustus were frightened from court by the frowns of Tiberius, arts and letters were mute. The mild reign of Trajan and of his successors revived them for a while; but, after the death of the Antonines, even the power of copying had failed, and the following crowd of rhetoricians and grammarians sunk lower and lower, until they lost even the power of feeling.

While heathen literature was thus rapidly declining, in consequence only of the decrepitude of the society which it represented, the zeal of the earliest Christians, and the controversies of their numerous sects, filled the libraries with many thousand volumes of ascetic visions and theological sophisms. The East and West rivalled each other in their pious enthusiasm, as well as in their polemic animosity; and, though a few illustrious names, in a religious point of view, may yet be cited with respect, it is nevertheless certain, that their intolerant austerity, by proscribing the perusal of profane writers, as teachers of idolatry and immorality, and exciting the persecuting frenzy of bigoted monarchs, hastened the downfall of the Latin language and literature. This sacrifice to a

blind superstition dried up the fountains from which pure light might yet have been derived; so that the work of destruction was almost complete, long before the first appearance of barbarian destroyers.

The diligence of modern writers has been considerably employed in vindicating the reputation of the Gothic, Frankish, and Lombard conquerors of Italy from the exaggerated charges of barbarism raised against their memory by the ignorant fanaticism of the Latin monks of the Middle Ages. Even if none of the memorials of those conquerors had been preserved, reason ought to have satisfied us, that such large national bodies could not have been prevented from dissolution without sound political institutions, and that those tribes could not have wandered from one end of the continent to the other, inflamed by a spirit of adventure, and by a desire of military renown, without being excited and cheered by the charms of their minstrels. Poetry there certainly was, in the enrapturing joy of triumph with which they hailed a new land, which was to be the inheritance of their children; there was poetry and romance in those long rows of chariots, that carried after them their wives and infants, to make their hearts beat with redoubled anxiety in the hour of danger.

The successful researches of German scholars in our day have made known to Europe the songs of the bards of their forefathers, back to the days of Alaric and Attila; but that northern poetry, if ever it flourished in Italy, as it would seem probable, especially among the more cultivated warriors of Theodoric, could not long resist the spell of a southern climate. The comforts of a settled life made the warrior indifferent to the scenes of peril and strife, which were sung in those national traditions. The northern mythology lost all interest with its sacred character; and the warlike verses of the German tribes died away soon after the conquest, with the sound of their trumpets and the neighing of their steeds.

But whatever may have been the state of their mental culture in their native forests, it is not less true that the northern conquerors entertained a deep-rooted aversion to the Roman lore, which they considered as a source of corruption and effeminacy, a school of fraud and perfidy; and, regarding it as such, they hastened its extermination with all the means that their ignorant ferocity could suggest. The Lombards had the reputation of being the most barbarous, as they were the bravest, of the German tribes. Italy, it is believed, sank, under

their dominion, into a more deplorable state of ignorance than any of the neighbouring countries. Still the reigns of Luitprand, Rachis, and Astolph were signalized by the wisest administration, and several distinguished men of their nation began a reformation of the system of studies, which Charlemagne knew how to appreciate and profit by.

During the two centuries of Lombard dominion, the Latin language underwent its final catastrophe. That language, always corrupted in all the provinces, especially in Cisalpine Gaul, where, as in Gaul, Spain, and Britain it had been enforced by the Romans, had already been turned by popular abuse into a barbarous dialect, long before any extraneous mixture. But when, in the long contact between the two heterogeneous races, the mixture was effected, it gave rise to that bastard tongue, which was, with slight modifications, equally spoken over all the late Roman provinces, and which, under the name of Romance language, became the source of the modern languages of the South of Europe. In that mixture, of course, the Latin furnished the greatest number of words, because the conquered nations were the most numerous; but the construction, the inflections, the articles, and all grammatical forms obeyed the influence of the northern races, both because such forms could be more easily adopted and practised, and because conquerors do not wish to learn grammar from their slaves. Thus, agreeably to the observation of a modern Italian critic, we see terms referring to the common wants of life, to be generally of Latin derivation, while names belonging to the art of war, and to politics and government, are generally of Teutonic origin; which fact arose. from two different necessities; the conquerors were obliged to learn such words as could express what they wanted from their new subjects, and the conquered were compelled to learn the names of the arms that crushed, and of the new authority that was forced upon them. The Romance language, in its origin, might be fairly considered as one, and it continued to serve as a common vehicle of communication between the different nations of Europe, until those formless, popular idioms, having by the charms of poetry been turned into polished and elegant tongues, the limits between them were more clearly defined; and, distinguishing them by their affirmative particles, they called the Romance Provençal, VOL. L. NO. 106.

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