effect with it that makes us honour his memory long after the Mount has vanished from his kindred; in days when the brave and beautiful symbols on his armorial coat look dim and old-fashioned, and when even his gentile name of Lindsay must owe its chief honour to the merits of those who bear it. For many ages, every man of any gifts naturally looked to the Church as the field for his employment. But during the period over which these men's lives extended, a new element came into European affairs, in the classical literature, with all the ideas it brought with it, of which the man of letters was naturally the exponent. He thus became superadded as a teacher to the existing staff of the instructors of mankind; and as poet, moralist, satirist, and in other capacities, was the rival, and, as it soon proved, the natural opponent of the priest. Europe has never been without this element, this truly liberal element. Satirists were found three hundred years before Erasmus's time, in the authors of those Latin rhyming-poems, of whom Walter Mapes stands as the representative; and the minstrel, and even the household fool (who has yet to be investigated, and perhaps has never been thoroughly appreciated), were all parts of it,-parts, that is, of the representation of the thoughts and passions of mankind, of which the priest was in large measure the regulator. Not a minstrel, not a satirist, not a fool, perhaps, but contributed something towards the ripening of that revolt which made its first great triumph in the times I have been speaking of; and which now walks the world, with many names, hundred-eyed and hundred-handed, "conquering and to conquer." The body of men who succeeded to Erasmus and Buchanan followed up their work. The literary man was the embodiment of minstrel, reformer, and satirist, and superseded these; and (if only as a new guise, sometimes, of the household fool) is to be traced henceforth as a highly important agent in the affairs of Europe. LECTURE III. EARLY SATIRE.-BOILEAU, BUTLER, DRYDEN. BEFORE the end of the seventeenth century, Satire had assumed in Europe a polished and developed form; had derived from the ancient literature whatever was necessary to it; and had reached, in point of language and finish, a completeness and correctness beyond which it has not made any marked advance. In the famous Boileau, and in the famous Dryden, whose work belongs to the latter half of that seventeenth century, we have the Satire proper (in its form of a satiric poem, and much indebted to Horace and Juvenal);—we have it, I say, in full ripeness and perfection. Each of these men is among moderns a classic; each remains a finished and developed specimen of his class; and the lapse of time and the progress of culture have not enabled us to give to their forms any further force or finish. But, as I intimated to you in my last Lecture, Europe can never have been said to have been without this satirical element. In turning our eyes to |