CHAPTER IX

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THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

More than half a century before the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, the learned men of that city, apprehensive of the approaching fall of the empire, had begun to emigrate into Italy, where they opened schools, and became the preceptors of princes and the guides of the public taste, which they directed towards the study of the classic writers of Greece especially, and even of Rome. But it was the fall of Constantinople in 1453 which filled the Italian cities with these learned strangers.

The Italians of that age needed only to receive this kind of direction, and to be aided by these means of study; for they had for some time been placed under those peculiar circumstances which have ever proved the most favourable to the advancement of the human mind. Throughout a number of independent states--crowded upon a narrow space, the same language, yet diversified by dialects, was spoken. The energy, the rivalry, the munificence that accompany an active commerce kept the whole mass of society in movement; while the influence of a gorgeous superstition, which sought to recommend itself by every embellishment that the genius of man could devise or execute, overruled the tendency of successful trade, and directed the ambition of princely merchants towards objects more noble and intellectual than are those which wealth usually selects as the means of distinction.

The formation of libraries, suggested or favoured by the abundant importation of manuscripts from Constantinople, was the means not only of making more widely known the works of those Greek authors which had never fallen into oblivion, but of prompting researches which issued in the recovery of the Latin writers also, many of whom had long been forgotten. The appetite for books having thus been quickened, neither cost nor labour was thenceforward spared in their accumulation; and learned men were despatched, in all directions, throughout Europe, western Asia, and Africa, expressly to collect manuscripts. In the course of a few years, most of the authors that are now known to us, were brought together in the libraries of Rome, Naples, Venice, Florence, Milan, Vienna, and Paris, where they were laid open to those who were best qualified to give them forth anew to the world.

Thus aided by the munificence and zeal of princes and popes, the scholars of the fifteenth century sedulously applied themselves to the discovery, the restoration, and the publication of the remains of Greek and Roman literature; and so it was that in the course of sixty or eighty years, most of the works now known had been committed to the press. Since that time some few discoveries have been made; but the principal improvements in classic literature, of later date, have consisted in the emendation of the text of ancient authors by means of a more extensive collation of manuscripts than the first editors had any opportunity to institute. This restoration of the remains of ancient works to their pristine integrity has not been effected, like that of a dilapidated building, or a mutilated statue, by the addition of new materials in an imagined conformity with the plan and taste of the original work; but by the industrious collection and replacement of the very particles of which it at first consisted.

The invention of printing, which virtually exempts books from the operation of the law that subjects all things mundane to the decays of time, has greatly promoted also the process of their renovation; for, by giving to the issue of an edition of a standard work a degree of importance, several hundred times greater than what belonged to the transcription of a single copy, it has called for the employment of a proportionably larger amount of learning, diligence, and caution in the work of revision; and then, by enabling each successive editor to avail himself of the labours of his predecessors, the advantages belonging to the concentration of many minds upon the same subject have been secured.

It is a fact therefore, the significance of which should be clearly understood, that, since the fifteenth century, the lapse of time, instead of gradually impairing and corrupting the literary remains of antiquity, has incessantly contributed to their renovation and purification. Indeed it may be affirmed that, in relation to the amount, the exactitude, and the certainty of our knowledge, we are not receding from remote ages, but are constantly approaching towards them. In a thousand instances what was unknown, or was doubtful, or imperfect, or corrupted, at the commencement of the fifteenth century, has been ascertained, restored, and completed in the nineteenth. The history and the literature of Greece and Rome--long inhumed in monasteries, were, at the period of their re-appearance, liable to uncertainties and to suspicions which not all the learning and industry of that vigorous age were able to dispel. But the learning and the industry of the four centuries that have since elapsed, constantly directed towards the same objects, and constantly accumulating a various mass of evidence, have left exceedingly few questions of literary antiquity open to controversy.

Thus then, by the mention of some leading facts, we have traced the remains of ancient literature up to the time when they passed to the press, and when their history can no longer be regarded as obscure or questionable. Nor can it be thought that this body of literature is now liable to the hazards of extinction from political changes, or from the decline of learning in this or that country; for unless a universal devastation should take its course, at once, over every region of the civilized world, the literature now extant in books can neither perish, nor suffer corruption. A temple, a statue, a picture, or a gem is but _one_; and however durable may be the material of which it consists, it continually decays, and it is always destructible. The touch of the sculptor moulders from the chiselled surface; and the time will come when every monument of his genius shall have crumbled into dust, and when his fame--lost from the marble, shall live only in the works of the poets and historians who were his contemporaries.

Thus it is that the _written_ records of distant ages, with the knowledge of which the intellectual, moral, and political well-being of mankind is inseparably connected, are secured from extinction by a mode of conservation that is less liable to extensive hazards than any other that can be imagined. If Man be cut off from the knowledge of the past, he becomes indifferent to the future, and thenceforward sinks into the rudeness and ferocity of the sensual life. The redundant amplitude, therefore, of the means by which this knowledge is preserved, only bears a due proportion to the importance of the consequences that depend upon its perpetuation.

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