Saviour and his apostles; and at this period the purity of the Christian doctrine was awfully sullied by error, and the prophetic intimations of the church's fall and disgrace were receiving an impressive accomplishment. The impostures of the papacy disfigure the pages of even the purest ecclesiastical writers; the truth which had triumphed over the proudest strongholds of Grecian and Roman paganism had lost almost every distinctive feature of its original character; and the servants of the man of sin" may alike be found ministering at the altars and occupying the thrones of the eastern and western sees.

If we go on to the close of the fifth century, we shall find the church's fortunes more and more overcast; spiritual supineness and heretical pravity were on the increase; and only a few glimmering stars preserved the hemisphere of the religious world from the totality of mental and moral darkness. One of the most prominent characteristics of the reign of superstitious observance, now almost universal, was the neglect of letters; and as Mr. Clarke's labours bring the subject immediately before us, we shall endeavour, in our review, to give a hasty illustration of ecclesiastical literature during the long subjection of Christendom to the dominion of Antichrist.

Among the causes which led to that mental gloom which covered the face of Europe, for so many ages, we must regard as the most fatal, the overthrow of the western empire by the intrusive hordes of Scandinavia, and the frequent irruption of the barbarians into the Thracian provinces to the very walls of the eastern capital. The civilized world was overwhelmed by apparently inexhaustible mi

grations from the vast teeming regions of Sarmatia and Scythia; the refinements of science and philosophy, and the institutions of social life, were swept away by the tide of foreign invasion; the hunting spear of the northmen was waved in the palace of the luxurious Roman; and the barbarism of the victors and the degeneracy of the vanquished rapidly brought on an era which has, with some exaggeration indeed, been described as a " period of intellectual night," ""the season of winter in the history of man." There were, however, many exceptions among the conquerors of the Cæsars to this charge; the rule of the Ostrogoth, in Italy was, upon the whole, favourable to the interests of learning, and the name of Theodoric, the patron of Boethius and Cassiodorus, though distinguished by no mental superiority himself, deserves to be mentioned as one who supported the sinking cause of letters, when deserted by its former patrons.

It was intimated, if we remember rightly, in our notice of the former volume of this work, that the impression commonly made by the hackneyed epithet," the dark ages," was by no means correct; that at no period was literature extinct in the church; and the survey which we have been led to take of the times thus designated, has not induced us to alter our opinion. In looking over the long stretch of years, extending from the close of the Augustan to the dawn of the Medicean age-from Claudian, the last child of Roman song, to the era when its tones were heard around the throne of Leo-in examining Europe during this interval of ten or twelve centuries, from sunny Italy to the frozen north, we think we perceive a "remnant" amid "cloisters

gray," and in the "dark monastic cell," who cultivated polite literature with ardour, and were anxious to transmit to posterity the ancient productions, inspired and uninspired, which had been saved from the wreck of the Roman world. Amid the intellectual lethargy which characterised the neighbour hood of the Vatican-the ignorance which had fastened like the nightmare, but with a firmer gripe, upon the courts of princes and the college of cardinals-there were a few individuals, who, with the solitary lamp at even, or the first streaks of daylight peeping through the narrow casements of the abbey, pursued the "noiseless tenor of their way," copying some precious relic of the olden time, embellishing some page of sacred story, or inditing some holy rhythm to cheer the palmer or the way-worn pilgrim on his road. It must be acknowledged that the proof is vastly greater with reference to the cultivation of sacred and ecclesiastical than profane literature, yet in no part of the intervening ages, between its fall in the sixth and its revival in the fifteenth century, do we lose sight of the masterspirits of Greece and Rome. The execution of a large number of manuscripts of their productionsthe references to them in the works of writers of the period which are still extant-afford abundant evidence that intellect was not so completely stultified as familiar representations would lead us to suppose. The fact is, as a modern author, but no incompetent judge, Mr. Isaac Taylor, has remarked, that reason, though misdirected, was not sleeping; philosophy was rather bewildered than inert and learning was immured, but not lost.

In accounting for the preservation of the time-honoured pages of the ancients amid the dangers of

N. S. No. 89.

what may be called the middle passage, we are inclined to look favourably upon the various institutions of monachism. Though the offspring of a mistaken piety, and productive as it eventually proved of lamentable evils, the assumption and prevalence of the monastic life, contributed to secure an asylum for manuscripts by the erection of monasteries in which they were deposited, and to promote their preservation by transcriptions, in which task the monks assiduously engaged. Those religious edifices which still exist in ivy-clad ruins among us, hastening to total decay, are hence entitled, in some degree, to our respect, as having afforded to sacred and profane learning, a safe retreat in rude and barbarous ages. Most of them were founded antecedent to the complete literary degradation of Europe; and, fortunately, the MSS. of the fathers, the classics, and inspired writers, were deposited in the monastic libraries, when ignorance alike distinguished the prince, the bishop, the baron, and the peasant. Secluded from secular engagements within the walls of their abbeys, and oppressed with the monotony of unvarying ceremonials, the religious dissipated the listlessness of their inert mode of life, when unoccupied with the services of the altar, by revising, correcting, and copying; and had it not been for some such provision as this, much of sacred and profane writ must inevitably have perished in the rude and turbulent times, which immediately succeeded the establishment of monkery.

It was not, however, at its first institution that monachism was any friend to the cause of learning; the practice of the Essenes and Therapeutæ, in despising science as part and parcel of an unholy

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world, was adopted by some of the early Christian sodalities; and hence the recluses who do honour to the times of Bede and Bacon, disgrace the age of Hieronymus and Basil. It was amid the storms of Gothic invasion, when Europe submitted to barbarian mastership, that the monastery became a sanctuary for letters, and the conventual church attained any literary celebrity. It is not pretended that the majority of the monks had at any period any claims to learning; this was the portion only of a few; but the monastic rules enjoined upon all an employment in the highest degree friendly to the learning of which only the few could boast. Those rules also required that in each establishment the original number of the congregation should be maintained; and in the continual calls which were made upon the surrounding population to fill up the ranks of the church, some of these, existing in all communities, upon whom nature seems to have impressed from their birth "the pale cast of thought," would be enlisted in the service of the altar. The child of the noble, as well as one of plebeian blood, who preferred the lettered page to the sword and the tournament was immediately devoted to the cloister; the slightest development of a fondness for books was everywhere regarded as a call from the church to her banners; so that the taste and custom of the times give us reason to suppose that every monàstic society would have its individuals gifted with a thirst for knowledge, fond of a life of study, and assiduous in labour to perpetuate the productions of the classic ages. The situation of the abbeys was generally favourable to their conservative character, at a distance from the large towns and cities, so often given

over to sack and pillage in the times of feudalism. The religious houses were most frequently founded in some dell of shade and solitude, or mountain recess, or islandstudded lake-a far removal from the scenes of busy life was regarded as essential to that abstraction from terrestrial affairs and meditation upon the spiritual world which the early recluses sought; and even when disturbed in their retreat by the warrior or the bandit, the monastery was oftener spoiled of its sacramental plate and golden crucifixes, than of its rolls of parchment, vellum, or papyrus.

We know not if our readers have ever chanced to have been at Tintern, or Fountains, or Lochlevin, some fine evening in June, when the sun has been smiling benevolence upon the world as he left it behind the gray distant mountains, blessing the

"Bridal of earth and sky;"

but it is among our reminiscences to have been wandering among the old moss-grown ruins at the "witching hour,"

"when twilight steals In shadowy softness o'er each lake and tree,

And when from heaven the unfettered spirit feels

A calm that looks into futurity." And in such circumstances, instead of "looking into futurity" with the poet, we could not help thinking of the past, especially when imagination, as if playing the magician's part, or acting the resurrectionist, conjured up to the mind's eye a vision of the days of yore. The prostrate walls, among which we had been clambering, were reared by invisible hands; their ancient livery of damp and mould had vanished; the broken arches of the cloister had be