vailing faith, which speedily drew to itself all the learning and intellectual strength that remained in the state. The bishops and priests, full of life and of zeal, naturally were recurred to in order to fill all civil situations requiring thought or information. It is wrong to reproach their exercise of these powers as an usurpation; they alone were capable of exercising them. Thus has the natural course of things prescribed for all ages and countries. The clergy alone were mentally strong and morally zealous: they became all-powerful. It is the law of the universe."-Lecture iii. 27, 31; Civilisation Européenne.

ble means of emerging from the general chaos. The whole of Europe, accordingly, at the same time adopted it. Even those portions of society which were most strangers, apparently, to that system, entered warmly into its spirit, and were fain to share in its protection. The crown, the church, the communities, were constrained to accommodate themselves to it. The churches became suzerain or vassal; the burghs had their lords and their feuars; the monasteries and abbeys had their feudal re

"A decisive proof that, in the tenth century, the feudal system had become necessary, and was, in truth, the only social state possible, is to be found in the universality of its adoption. Universally, upon the cessation of barbarism, the feudal forms were adopted. At the first moment of barbarian conquest, men saw only the triumph of chaos. All unity, all general civilization disappeared; on all sides was seen society falling into dissolution; and, in its stead, arising a multitude of little, obscure, isolated communities. This appeared to all the contemporaries nothing short of universal anarchy. The poets, the chroniclers of the Nothing can be more just or important than time, viewed it as the approach of the end of these observations; and they throw a new and the world. It was, in truth, the end of the consoling light on the progress and ultimate ancient world; but the commencement of a destiny of European society. They are as new one, placed on a broad basis, and with original as they are momentous. Robertson, large means of social improvement and indiwith his honest horror of the innumerable cor-vidual happiness. ruptions which, in the time of Leo X. and Lu- "Then it was that the feudal system became ther, brought about the Reformation-Sismon- necessary, inevitable. It was the only possi di, with his natural detestation of a faith which had urged on the dreadful cruelties of the crusade of the Albigenses, and which produced the revocation of the edict of Nantes-have alike overlooked those important truths, so essential to a right understanding of the history of modern society. They saw that the arrogance and cruelty of the Roman clergy had produced innumerable evils in later times; that their venality in regard to indulgences and abuse of absolution had brought religion itself into discredit; that the absurd and in-tainers, as well as the temporal barons. Roycredible tenets which they still attempted to force on mankind, had gone far to alienate the intellectual strength of modern Europe, during the last century, from their support. Seeing this, they condemned it absolutely, for all times and in all places. They fell into the usual error of men in reasoning on former from their own times. They could not make "the past The establishment of the feudal system and the future predominate over the present." thus universally in Europe, produced one They felt the absurdity of many of the legends effect, the importance of which can hardly be which the devout Catholics received as un- exaggerated. Hitherto the mass of mankind doubted truths, and they saw no use in per- had been collected under the municipal instipetuating the belief in them; and thence they tutions which had been universal in antiquity, conceived that they must always have been in cities, or wandered in vagabond hordes equally unserviceable, forgetting that the eigh-through the country. Under the feudal system teenth was not the eighth century; and that, during the dark ages, violence would have rioted without control, if, when reason was in abeyance, knowledge scanty, and military strength alone in estimation, superstition had not thrown its unseen fetters over the barbarian's arms. They saw that the Romish clergy, during five centuries, had laboured strenuously, and often with the most frightful cruelty, to crush independence of thought in matters of faith, and chain the human mind to the tenets, often absurd and erroneous, of her Papal creed; and they forgot that, during five preceding centuries, the Christian church had laboured as assiduously to establish the independence of thought from physical coercion, "The feudal proprietor established himself and had alone kept alive, during the interreg-in an isolated place, which, for his own pronum of reason, the sparks of knowledge and the principles of freedom.

In the same liberal and enlightened spirit Guizot views the feudal system, the next grand characteristic of modern times.

alty itself was disguised under the name of a feudal superior. Every thing was given in fief; not only lands, but certain rights flowing from them, as that of cutting wood, fisheries, or the like. The church made subinfeudations of their casual revenues, as the dues on marriages, funerals, and baptisms."

these men lived isolated, each in his own habitation, at a great distance from each other. A glance will show that this single circumstance must have exercised on the character of society, and the course of civilization, the social preponderance; the government of society passed at once from the towns to the country-private took the lead of public property-private prevailed over public life. Such was the first effect, and it was an effect purely material, of the establishment of the feudal system. But other effects, still more material, followed, of a moral kind, which have exercised the most important effects on the European manners and mind.

tection, he rendered secure. He lived there, with his wife, his children, and a few faithful friends, who shared his hospitality, and contributed to his defence. Around the castle, in its vicinity, were established the farmers and

serfs who cultivated his domain. In the midst | is a modification of the patriarchal society: it of that inferior, but yet allied and protected is the family of the chief, expanded during a population, religion planted a church, and in- succession of generations, and forming a little troduced a priest. He was usually the chap-aggregation of dependents, still influenced by lain of the castle, and at the same time the the same attachments, and subjected to the curate of the village; in subsequent ages these same authority. But the feudal community two characters were separated; the village was very different. Allied at first to the clan, pastor resided beside his church. This was it was yet in many essential particulars dissithe primitive feudal society-the cradle, as it milar. There did not exist between its memwere, of the European and Christian world. bers the bond of relationship; they were not "From this state of things necessarily arose of the same blood; they often did not speak a prodigious superiority on the part of the pos- the same language. The feudal lord belonged sessor of the fief, alike in his own eyes, and in to a foreign and conquering, his serfs to a dothe eyes of those who surrounded him. The mestic and vanquished race. Their employfeeling of individual importance, of personal ments were as various as their feelings and freedom, was the ruling principle of savage their traditions. The lord lived in his castle, life; but here a new feeling was introduced- with his wife, his children, and relations: the the importance of a proprietor, of the chief serfs on the estate, of a different race, of dif of a family, of a master, predominated over ferent names, toiled in the cottages around. that of an individual. From this situation This difference was prodigious-it exercised arose an immense feeling of superiority-a a most powerful effect on the domestic habits superiority peculiar to the feudal ages, and of modern Europe. It engendered the attachentirely different from any thing which had yet ments of home: it brought women into their been experienced in the world. Like the feudal proper sphere in domestic life. The little solord, the Roman patrician was the head of a ciety of freemen, who lived in the midst of an family, a master, a landlord. He was, at the alien race in the castle, were all in all to each same time, a religious magistrate, a pontiff in other. No forum or theatres were at hand, the interior of his family. He was, moreover, with their cares or their pleasures; no city a member of the municipality in which his enjoyments were a counterpoise to the plea property was situated, and perhaps one of sures of country life. War and the chase the august senate, which, in name at least, still broke in, it is true, grievously at times, upon ruled the empire. But all this importance and this scene of domestic peace. But war and dignity was derived from without-the patri- the chase could not last for ever; and, in the cian shared it with the other members of his long intervals of undisturbed repose, family municipality-with the corporation of which attachments formed the chief solace of life. he formed a part. The importance of the Thus it was that WOMEN acquired their parfeudal lord, again, was purely individual-he amount influence-thence the manners of chiowed nothing to another; all the power he valry, and the gallantry of modern times; they "njoyed emanated from himself alone. What were but an extension of the courtesy and a feeling of individual consequence must such habits of the castle. The word courtesy shows a situation have inspired-what pride, what it-it was in the court of the castle that the insolence, must it have engendered in his habits it denotes were learned."-Lecture iv. mind! Above him was no superior, of whose 13, 17; Civilisation Européenne. orders he was to be the mere interpreter or We have exhausted, perhaps, exceeded, our organ-around him were no equals. No all-limits; and we have only extracted a few of powerful municipality made his wishes bend the most striking ideas from the first hundred to its own-no superior authority exercised a control over his wishes; he knew no bridle on his inclinations, but the limits of his power, or the presence of danger.

"Another consequence, hitherto not sufficiently attended to, but of vast importance, flowed from this society.

"The patriarchal society, of which the Bible and the Oriental monuments offer the model. was the first combination of men. The chief of a tribe lived with his children, his relations, the different generations who have assembled around him. This was the situation of Abraham of the patriarchs: it is still that of the Arab tribes which perpetuate their manners. The clan, of which remains still exist in the mountains of Scotland, and the sept of Ireland,

pages of one of Guizot's works-ex uno disce omnes. The translation of them has been an agreeable occupation for a few evenings; but they awake one mournful impression-the voice which uttered so many noble and enlightened sentiments is now silent; the genius which once cast abroad light on the history of man, is lost in the vortex of present politics. The philosopher, the historian, are merged in the statesman-the instructor of all in the governor of one generation. Great as have been his services, brilliant his course in the new career into which he has been launched, it is as nothing compared to that which he has left, for the one confers present distinction, the other immortal fame.

41

HOMER, DANTE, AND MICHAEL ANGELO.

what would remain? Petrarch spent his best years in restoring his verses. Tasso portrayed the siege of Jerusalem, and the shock of Europe and Asia, almost exactly as Homer had done the contest of the same forces, on the same shores, two thousand five hundred years before. Milton's old age, when blind and poor, was solaced by hearing the verses recited of the poet, to whose conceptions his own mighty spirit had been so much indebted; and Pope deemed himself fortunate in devoting his life to the translation of the Iliad.

THERE is something inexpressibly striking, it may almost be said awful, in the fame of HOMER. Three thousand years have elapsed since the bard of Chios began to pour forth his strains; and their reputation, so far from declining, is on the increase. Successive nations are employed in celebrating his works; generation after generation of men are fascinated by his imagination. Discrepancies of race, of character, of institutions, of religion, of age, of the world, are forgotten in the common worship of his genius. In this universal tribute of gratitude, modern Europe vies with No writer in modern times has equalled the remote antiquity, the light Frenchman with the wide-spread fame of the Grecian bard; but it volatile Greek, the impassioned Italian with the may be doubted whether, in the realms of enthusiastic German, the sturdy Englishman thought, and in sway over the reflecting world, with the unconquerable Roman, the aspiring the influence of DANTE has not been almost Russian with the proud American. Seven as considerable. Little more than five hundred cities, in ancient times, competed for the hon-years, indeed, have elapsed-not a sixth of the our of having given him birth, but seventy na- thirty centuries which have tested the strength tions have since been moulded by his produc- of the Grecian patriarch-since the immortal tions. He gave a mythology to the ancients; Florentine poured forth his divine conceptions; he has given the fine arts to the modern world. but yet there is scarcely a writer of eminence Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Juno, are still house- since that time, in works even bordering on hold words in every tongue; Vulcan is yet the imagination, in which traces of his genius are god of fire, Neptune of the ocean, Venus of not to be found. The Inferno has penetrated love. When Michael Angelo and Canova the world. If images of horror are sought strove to imbody their conceptions of heroism after, it is to his works that all the subsequent or beauty, they portrayed the heroes of the ages have turned; if those of love and divine Iliad. Flaxman's genius was elevated to the felicity are desired, all turn to the Paradise and highest point in imbodying its events. Epic the Spirit of Beatrice. When the historians of poets, in subsequent times, have done little the French Revolution wished to convey an more than imitate his machinery, copy his idea of the utmost agonies they were called on characters, adopt his similes, and, in a few in- to portray, they contented themselves with saystances, improve upon his descriptions. Paint-ing it equalled all that the imagination of Dante ing and statuary, for two thousand years, have had conceived of the terrible. Sir Joshua Reybeen employed in striving to portray, by the nolds has exerted his highest genius in depictpencil or the chisel, his yet breathing concep-ing the frightful scene described by him, when tions. Language and thought itself have been moulded by the influence of his poetry. Images of wrath are still taken from Achilles, of pride from Agamemnon, of astuteness from Ulysses, of patriotism from Hector, of tenderness from Andromache, of age from Nestor. The galleys of Rome were, the line-of-battle ships of France and England still are, called after his heroes. The Agamemnon long bore the flag of Nelson; the Ajax perished by the flames within sight of the tomb of the Telamonian hero, on the shores of the Hellespont; the Achilles was blown up at the battle of Trafalgar. Alexander the Great ran round the tomb of Achilles before undertaking the conquest of Asia. It was the boast of Napoleon that his mother reclined on tapestry representing the heroes of the Iliad, when he was brought into the world. The greatest poets of ancient and modern times have spent their lives in the study of his genius or the imitation of his works. Withdraw from subsequent poetry the images, mythology and characters of the Iliad, and

Blackwood's Magazine, January, 1845.

Ugolino perished of hunger in the tower of Pisa. Alfieri, Metastasio, Corneille, Lope de Vega, and all the great masters of the tragic muse, have sought in his works the germs of their finest conceptions. The first of these tragedians marked two-thirds of the Inferno and Paradiso as worthy of being committed to memory. Modern novelists have found in his prolific mind the storehouse from which they have drawn their noblest imagery, the chord by which to strike the profoundest feelings of the human heart. Eighty editions of his poems have been published in Europe within the last half century; and the public admiration, so far from being satiated, is augmenting. Every scholar knows how largely Milton was indebted to his poems for many of his most powerful images. Byron inherited, though often at second hand, his mantle, in many of his most moving conceptions. Schiller has imbodied them in a noble historic mirror; and the dreams of Goethe reveal the secret influence of the terrible imagination which portrayed the deep remorse and hopeless agonies of Malebolge.

MICHAEL ANGELO has exercised an influence

It is of more moment to consider in what the greatness of these illustrious men really consists-to what it has probably been owing and in what particulars they bear an analogy to each other.

on modern art, little, if at all, inferior to that position of present reputation. But opinion is produced on the realms of thought by Homer freed from all these disturbing influences by and Dante. The father of Italian painting, the the lapse of time. The grave is the greatest author of the frescoes on the Sistine Chapel, of all purifiers. Literary jealousy, interested he was, at the same time, the restorer of an- partiality, vulgar applause, exclusive favour, cient sculpture, and the intrepid architect who alike disappear before the hand of death. We placed the Pantheon in the air. Raphael con- never can be sufficiently distrustful of present fessed, that he owed to the contemplation of opinion, so largely is it directed by passion or his works his most elevated conceptions of interest. But we may rely with confidence on their divine art. Sculpture, under his original the judgment of successive generations on dehand, started from the slumber of a thousand parted eminence; for it is detached from the years, in all the freshness of youthful vigour; chief cause of present aberration. So various architecture, in subsequent times, has sought are the prejudices, so contradictory the parin vain to equal, and can never hope to sur-tialities and predilections of men, in different pass, his immortal monument in the matchless countries and ages of the world, that they dome of St. Peter's. He found painting in its never can concur through a course of ceninfancy-he left it arrived at absolute perfec- turies in one opinion, if it is not founded in tion. He first demonstrated of what that no- truth and justice. The vox populi is often little ble art is capable. In the Last Judgment he more than the vox diaboli; but the voice of revealed its wonderful powers, exhibiting, as it ages is the voice of God. were, at one view, the whole circles of Dante's Inferno portraying with terrible fidelity the agonies of the wicked, when the last trumpet shall tear the veil from their faces, and exhibit in undisguised truth that most fearful of spectacles a naked human heart. Casting aside, perhaps with undue contempt, the adventitious aid derived from finishing, colouring, and execution, he threw the whole force of his genius into the design, the expression of the features, the drawing of the figures. There never was such a delineator of bone and muscle as Michael Angelo. His frescoes stand out in bold relief from the walls of the Vatican, like the sculptures of Phidias from the pediment of the Parthenon. He was the founder of the school of painting both at Rome and Florence -that great school which, disdaining the representation of still life, and all the subordinate appliances of the art, devoted itself to the representation of the grand and the beautiful; to the expression of passion in all its vehemence -of emotion in all its intensity. His incomparable delineation of bones and muscles was but a means to an end; it was the human heart, the throes of human passion, that his master-hand laid bare. Raphael congratulated himself, and thanked God that he had given him life in the same age with that painter; and Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his last address to the Academy, "reflected, not without vanity, that his Discourses bore testimony to his admiration of that truly divine man, and desired that the last words he pronounced in that academy, and from that chair, might be the name of Michael Angelo."*

The fame of these illustrious men has long been placed beyond the reach of cavil. Criticism cannot reach, envy cannot detract from, emulation cannot equal them. Great present celebrity, indeed, is no guarantee for future and enduring fame; in many cases, it is the reverse; but there is a wide difference between the judgment of the present and that of future ages. The favour of the great, the passions of the multitude, the efforts of reviewers, the interest of booksellers, a clique of authors, a coterie of ladies, accidental events, degrading propensities, often enter largely into the com

* Reynolds's Discourses, No. 16, ad finem.

They are all three distinguished by one peculiarity, which doubtless entered largely into their transcendent merit-they wrote in the infancy of civilization. Homer, as all the world knows, is the oldest profane author in existence. Dante flourished about the year 1300: he lived at a time when the English barons lived in rooms strewed with rushes, and few of them could sign their names. The long life of Michael Angelo, extending from 1474 to 1564, over ninety years, if not passed in the infancy of civilization, was at least passed in the childhood of the arts: before his time, painting was in its cradle. Cimabue had merely unfolded the first dawn of beauty at Florence; and the stiff figures of Pietro Perugino, which may be traced in the first works of his pupil Raphael, still attest the backward state of the arts at Rome. This peculiarity, applicable alike to all these three great men, is very remarkable, and beyond all question had a powerful iufluence, both in forming their peculiar character, and elevating them to the astonishing greatness which they speedily attained.

It gave them-what Johnson has justly termed the first requisite to human greatness

self-confidence. They were the first-at least the first known to themselves and their contemporaries-who adventured on their several arts; and thus they proceeded fearlessly in their great career. They had neither critics to fear, nor lords to flatter, nor former excellence to imitate. They portrayed with the pencil, or in verse, what they severally felt, undisturbed by fear, unswayed by example, unsolicitous about fame, unconscious of excellence. They did so for the first time. Thence the freshness and originality, the vigour and truth, the simplicity and raciness by which they are distinguished. Shakspeare owed much of his greatness to the same cause; and thence his similarity, in many respects, to these great masters of his own or the sister arts. When Pope asked Bentley what he thought of his translation of the Iliad, the scholar replied.

tics. He disturbs settled ideas, endangers established reputation, brings forward rivals to dominant fame. That is sufficient to render him the enemy of all the existing rulers in the world of taste. Even Jeffrey seriously lamented, in one of his first reviews of Scott's poems, that he should have identified himself with the unpicturesque and expiring images of feudality, which no effort could render poetical. Racine's tragedies were received with such a storm of criticism as wellnigh cost the sensitive author his life; and Rousseau was so rudely handled by contemporary writers on his first appearance, that it confirmed him in his morbid hatred of civilization. The vigour of these great men, indeed, overcame the obstacles created by contemporary envy; but how seldom, especially in a refined age, can genius effect such a prodigy? how often is it crushed in the outset of its career, or turned aside into the humble and unobtrusive path of imitation, to shun the danger with which that of originality is beset!

"You have written a pretty book, Mr. Pope; | agery or excellence, is persecuted by the cribut you must not call it Homer." Bentley was right. With all its pomp of language and melody of versification, its richness of imagery and magnificence of diction, Pope's Homer is widely different from the original. He could not avoid it. Your "awful simplicity of the Grecian bard, his artless grandeur and unaffected majesty," will be sought for in vain in the translation; but if they had appeared there, it would have been unreadable in that age. Michael Angelo, in his bold conceptions, energetic will, and rapid execution, bears a close resemblance to the father of poetry. In both, the same faults, as we esteem them, are conspicuous, arising from a too close imitation of nature, and a carelessness in rejecting images or objects which are of an ordinary or homely description. Dante was incomparably more learned than either: he followed Virgil in his descent to the infernal regions; and exhibits an intimate acquaintance with ancient history, as well as that of the modern Italian states, in the account of the characters he meets in that scene of torment. But in his own line he was entirely original. Homer and Virgil had, in episodes of their poems, introduced a picture of the infernal regions; but nothing on the plan of Dante's Inferno had before been thought of in the world. With much of the machinery of the ancients, it bears the stamp of the spiritual faith of modern times. It lays bare the heart in a way unknown even to Homer and Euripides. It reveals the inmost man in a way which bespeaks the centuries of self-reflection in the cloister which had preceded it. It is the basis of all the spiritual poetry of modern, as the Iliad is of all the external imagery of ancient, times.

In this respect there is a most grievous impediment to genius in later, or, as we term them, more civilized times, from which, in earlier ages, it is wholly exempt. Criticism, public opinion, the dread of ridicule-then too often crush the strongest minds. The weight of former examples, the influence of early habits, the halo of long-established reputation, force original genius from the untrodden path of invention into the beaten one of imitation. Early talent feels itself overawed by the colossus which all the world adores; it falls down and worships, instead of conceiving. The dread of ridicule extinguishes originality in its birth. Immense is the incubus thus laid upon the efforts of genius. It is the chief cause of the degradation of taste, the artificial style, the want of original conception, by which the literature of old nations is invariably distinguished. The early poet or painter who portrays what he feels or has seen, with no anxiety but to do so powerfully and truly, is relieved of a load which crushes his subsequent compeers to the earth. Mediocrity is ever envious of genius-ordinary capacity of original thought. Such envy in early times is innocuous or does not exist, at least to the extent which is felt as so baneful in subsequent periods. But in a refined and enlightened age, its influence becomes incalculable. Whoever strikes out a new region of thought or composition, whoever opens a fresh vein of im

Milton's Paradise Lost contains many more lines of poetic beauty than Homer's Iliad; and there is nothing in the latter poem of equal length, which will bear any comparison with the exquisite picture of the primeval innocence of our First Parents in his fourth book. Nevertheless, the Iliad is a more interesting poem than the Paradise Lost; and has produced and will produce a much more extensive impression on mankind. The reason is, that it is much fuller of event, is more varied, is more filled with images familiar to all mankind, and is less lost in metaphysical or philosophical abstractions. Homer, though the father of poets, was essentially dramatic; he was an incomparable painter; and it is his dramatic scenes, the moving panorama of his pictures, which fascinates the world. He often speaks to the heart, and is admirable in the delineation of character; but he is so, not by conveying the inward feeling, but by painting with matchless fidelity its external symptoms, or putting into the mouths of his characters the precise words they would have used in similar circumstances in real life. Even his immortal parting of Hector and Andromache is no exception to this remark; he paints the scene at the Scean gate exactly as it would have occurred in nature, and moves us as if we had seen the Trojan hero taking off his helmet to assuage the terrors of his infant son, and heard the lamentations of his mother at parting with her husband. But he does not lay bare the heart, with the terrible force of Dante, by a line or a word. There is nothing in Homer which conveys so piercing an idea of misery as the line in the Inferno, where the Florentine bard assigns the reason of the lamentations of the spirits in Malebolge

"Questi non hanno speranza di morte." "These have not the hope of death." There speaks the spiritual poet; he does not paint to the eye, he does not even convey character by the words he makes them utter; he pierces, by a single expression, at once to the heart.

Milton strove to raise earth to heaven; Homer brought down heaven to earth The latter