the close of the volume, an exceedingly able dissertation on this subject. The author gives us a survey of the intellectual and moral state of Europe in the fifteenth century, and shows us, in a perspicuous and philosophical manner, the coincidence of the final dispersion of the Greeks, with those mighty elements of regeneration which were then beginning to exert an influence, designed to mould the destinies of the world. But as an introduction to the subject, the author refers this event to the counsels of the Divine Providence watching over Europe, and mediating between the corruptions of the Eastern and Western Churches, which were robbing Christianity of its power to regenerate the world. These are his striking words :

:

"It pleased God to renovate Christendom, not by the recovery for a few years of the Holy Sepulchre, not by crowning wars upon the Saracens with victory, not by dragooning the Heathens of Northern Europe, and cursing the Paganism of the East. But it did please God to renovate Christendom by a dire visitation of the sword. It pleased Him to quench the pride of the Byzantines, of Emperors, Patriarchs, and people; to defile the temples; to obliterate the last vestiges of nationality in Greece; to enslave, ruin, or destroy mass after mass of nominally Christian and civilized populations; to cut the nerves of all political strength; to frustrate scheme after scheme of self-defence; to pour shame on the city of the Caesars, and spread terror and dismay through the court of the Pontiffs; to abandon the inland seas of Europe to the horrors of piracy, and to let loose the dread of THE TURK upon all the realms of elder civilization. These were the strange, yet most effectual, methods of social renovation."

But the most direct advantage which Europe, and the interests of the human race, derived from the destruction of the Greek Empire, was the impetus given to Greek literature and learning in general, by the diffusion of the Greeks and their inestimable classical treasures throughout the West. These treasures had been for ages entombed in Constantinople and the other cities of the Empire. Classical studies had never been neglected in the worst ages of the Greek Empire, and, even in the degraded age of the Palæologi, encouragement had been given to the study of ancient Greek literature; but in the hands of their degenerate descendants these ancient rulers of the human mind were altogether inoperative, and their works, which had once directed the intellect of man in its highest aspirations, and were destined to do so again, were locked up as so much useless treasure. The Greeks of the Middle Ages were but the keepers of Grecian literature. Meanwhile, the more vigorous intellect of Western Europe was ripening; a spirit of inquiry was springing up, never to be benumbed again; printing was invented just in time to receive, and perpetuate, and scatter throughout the world, the boundless manuscripts which the East was to entomb no longer. But the opening

Revival of Greek Learning.

97

of these rich sepulchres was the work of the barbarian Ottomans. For, although some individual Greeks had in earlier times brought the light of their learning into the far West, it was not until the dread of the Turk drove the Greeks to seek hold in Italy, that any thing like a study of the Greek tongue was known in Western Europe.

"Throughout Europe, but most especially in Italy, where the knowledge of Greek was reported to have been lost for several hundred years, learning, properly so called, might also be said to be extinct. When a thirst for knowledge began to show itself in Italy, and a few learned men devoted themselves to the improvement of the current Latin by a study of the ancient classics, and began to reduce their own vernacular to writing, most of them aspired to know, at least, the elements of Greek; and some, as Petrarch for example, acquired proficiency enough to read Homer. And their teachers, be it remembered, were persons who came from Greece, generally to escape the troubles that befel their country in consequence of the invasion of the Turks.

"The establishment of Universities, which began so early as the age of Charlemagne, with frequent additions to their number, until the period now before us, created seats of learning, ready for more effective occupation in what, without irreverence, we may venture to designate the fulness of time, in relation to the religious history of Europe, when learning in general, but more especially Greek and Oriental literature, should be sanctified to its highest uses."

We must not be misled into supposing that this revival of Greek literature was at once sanctified to its highest uses. It certainly exerted an indirect influence on the interests of religion by stimulating the human mind to philosophical inquiry, and by awakening a keen study of the language which our Lord and His Apostle had made as sacred as the Hebrew. But the first direction of this new ardour was towards Pagan antiquity, as such. Italy became intoxicated with classical enthusiasm; the philosophy of Plato was studied with far more intensity than the Greek Testament; and it was only when the Reformation was at hand, that this Pagan enchantment passed away, and Greek learning poured its treasures of criticism upon the sacred page and upon Christian theology.

"It was, after all, Chrysoloras, an Ambassador from Constantinople, sent to solicit aid from the Western powers against the Turks, who laid the foundations of Grecian learning in Italy. He came thither in the year 1395, and, after discharging his mission, preferred the security of Italy to the perils of Byzantium, and became public teacher of Greek in Venice, Florence, and Rome. Among his pupils were Barberino, Poggio, Leonardo Aretino, Strozzi, Guarino, Vergerio, Ugolino, Ambrosio Camaldolese, Manetti, and others whose names are inwrought into the history of that period, and who became the fathers of Italian literature, enriched with the lore and philosophy of Greece.

"The fall of Thessalonica in 1430, an event which we have narrated, gave some scholars to Italy, and among them Theodore Gaza, who rapidly acquired the Latin language, and became Rector of the University of Ferrara. Even the Council held at Ferrara and Florence, although the object for which it was convened could not be accomplished,-and the accomplishment of such an object as the union of two corrupt Churches could scarcely have contributed much to the welfare of the world,-was not altogether useless. While the more active politicians of the two Churches were prosecuting their negotiations or their debates, and while John Palæologus was hunting, and the humbler members of the imperial and patriarchal trains were wasting their hours in a restless indolence, a few men of superior genius occupied their leisure in pursuits or schemes of literary culture. The secession of Bessarion to the Church of Rome, while it added nothing to his own good fame, gave a powerful impulse to the revival of letters in the Western world; for Bessarion was a learned and energetic man, and a patron of literature."

Before the final sack of Constantinople, a very large portion of the manuscripts from which our modern classical literature derives its riches had been safely deposited in Italy; but in the city there were yet left an immense number in the various libraries. Mohammed himself was not a barbarian in his tastes, and would not have ruthlessly destroyed the Byzantine libraries; but, in the general lawlessness, numbers of them were lost for ever. One hundred and twenty thousand manuscripts are reported to have perished; and, after the fall of the city, volumes, now priceless, were sold for the smallest trifle. Enough of them, however, had been saved, and were already feeding the new printing-presses of Germany; many of the most distinguished Greeks, despairing of their city, had fled, carrying with them their treasures; and, after the city had fallen, the Mediterranean was crowded with ships bearing the disconsolate Greeks and their treasures to the West. Thus the decay and the ruin of the Greek Empire, while on the one hand it gave firm establishment to a barbarous power in the East, transferred, in compensation, to the West all that wealth of literature which the East had been unable to use.

We cannot but wish that the author had included in this Study a sketch of the relations which have subsisted during the last four hundred years between the Turks and the Greeks, especially as both have so remarkably re-appeared upon the scene in our own time. Both have engrossed much of the attention of our own century, and have been much mixed up with European politics. While men have been marking the decline of the Turkish Empire, and counting the days the "sick man" had yet to live, the Greeks, who have through all ages preserved something of their ineradicable spirit, have been erected into a nationality, and have entered upon a new probation. Four hundred years after their subjugation to the Turks, the Greeks have been

emancipated, and the ruin of Constantinople in some faint degree avenged. Another power, the inheritor and the champion of that religion which Mohammed II. trampled in the dust, has taken up the quarrel for its own ends. Europe has in our own age saved the Greeks from the Turks, and is now saving Turkey from the Greeks. These complications are too distant from the scene of his history to be entered into by the author; but some lines of connexion between the Turks and the Greeks of the fifteenth, and the Turks and the Greeks of the nineteenth, century might have been traced, which would at least have given some new feature of interest to the present struggle. But our limits are exhausted, and we cannot supply the deficiency. In conclusion, we lay down this little work with great pleasure. The same industrious learning and discriminating judgment, applied to other such leading epochs in modern history, would present us with a set of works deserving a high place in the historical literature of our age. Whether the series which this volume commences will be completed, we do not know; but the intrinsic value of these first-fruits themselves, the credit of the press from which they issue, and the good of the large circle of readers to whom it would be more immediately directed, induce us heartily to wish that it may.

ART. IV.-Kopernik et ses Travaux. Par M. DE CZYNSKY. Paris. 1854.

THE old fable tells us, that the daughters of Atlas and Pleione were, after death, transformed into the constellation which bears the name of the Pleiades. Six of the seven sisters had, in their mortal state, been wooed by the not very divine deities of the period, and the starry representatives of these ladies shone with a dazzling lustre in honour of their suitors. The seventh, unambitious Merope, had been content to become the consort of a King, Sisyphus of Corinth. On account of this mésalliance, the star of Merope was so obscure and dim as to be hardly visible to mortal eyes; and, consequently, while some denied it was in the heavens at all, others sought, as eagerly as men could look into the skies before the telescopic era, to detect the "lost Pleiad," and to give to the wanderer "a local habitation and a name." ""

The story is told with many variations; but in the above form it suits us best for an illustrative purpose. The wanderer, in fact, allowing the fable to assume the form of fact for a moment, had never moved from the station assigned to her. Men would not believe, for the exceedingly unsatisfactory reason. that the evidence of sense was contrary to belief; and many

went worlds away to seek a truth which, had they only known it, lay in a straight line before them.

It has been exactly thus with questions of Astronomy. It would seem as if the truth had at one time been patent to all, had then become obscured, had subsequently disappeared, and had been for ever after, on the strength of some tradition, asserted, denied, sought after, and, now and then, established.

Amid the yet disputed questions is that of the planets being habitable. The arguments for and against the possibility have been so recently re-asserted, and have been so widely read, that we do not feel authorized to re-produce them. But we may notice that, as a disputed point, it is one which has been productive of much muddling of brains from the earliest times.

That "Christian Cicero," Lactantius, when treating of the absurdities of Paganism, alludes to the idea of the Stoics, that the moon, at least, was inhabited. Plutarch, like a ready-witted advocate, has much to say on either side of the question, and may be safely cited by respective adversaries engaged upon this knotty question. The face which appears in the moon's orb, seems to have been accepted by some as a sign, if not a proof, that the orb was an occupied dwelling-place. Some old nursery traditions have led to similar conclusions. Lucian deals with the matter wittily, and Nicholas of Cusa descants learnedly on the solar and lunar "peoples." Giordano Bruno not only pleaded in favour of "plurality," but he conjectured that there were inhabitants in the innermost recesses of the earth. Kepler admitted Lunarians; and Wilkins not only did the same, but maintained that we should one day be able to reach and dwell among them! Some of the greatest of modern philosophers have been content to hint merely on the subject; philosophic French wits, or witty French philosophers, have boldly discussed it; and the great question has been treated theologically in many a pulpit. Wesley was of the opinion, expressed by Huygens, in his "Conjectures on the Planetary World," that "neither the moon nor any of the secondary planets are inhabited;" and the Rev. Baden Powell, after reviewing all that has been advanced on either side, remarks that "the whole.of the question turns on the same tacit but monstrous assumption, that, because the privileges of redemption are granted to the inhabitants of the earth, they are therefore not granted to those of any other worlds, and that it is a part of Christianity to hold this exclusive view." The reader will probably think that the assumption at least, whether plausible or "monstrous," is altogether on the other side,—with those, namely, who gratuitously believe in the existence of races of which science gives no evidence whatever, and Scripture not the slightest intimation.

* "Journal of the Rev. John Wesley," under date of Sept. 17th, 1759.