Critical and Historical Essays, vol 1 | Page 7

silver was more than quadruple of what it now is.
The city and its environs contained a hundred and seventy thousand
inhabitants. In the various schools about ten thousand children were
taught to read; twelve hundred studied arithmetic; six hundred received
a learned education.
The progress of elegant literature and of the fine arts was proportioned
to that of the public prosperity. Under the despotic successors of
Augustus, all the fields of intellect had been turned into arid wastes,
still marked out by formal boundaries, still retaining the traces of old
cultivation, but yielding neither flowers nor fruit. The deluge of
barbarism came. It swept away all the landmarks. It obliterated all the
signs of former tillage. But it fertilised while it devastated. When it
receded, the wilderness was as the garden of God, rejoicing on every
side, laughing, clapping its hands, pouring forth, in spontaneous
abundance, everything brilliant, or fragrant, or nourishing. A new
language, characterised by simple sweetness and simple energy, had
attained perfection. No tongue ever furnished more gorgeous and vivid
tints to poetry; nor was it long before a poet appeared who knew how to

employ them. Early in the fourteenth century came forth the Divine
Comedy, beyond comparison the greatest work of imagination which
had appeared since the poems of Homer. The following generation
produced indeed no second Dante: but it was eminently distinguished
by general intellectual activity. The study of the Latin writers had never
been wholly neglected in Italy. But Petrarch introduced a more
profound, liberal, and elegant scholarship, and communicated to his
countrymen that enthusiasm for the literature, the history, and the
antiquities of Rome, which divided his own heart with a frigid mistress
and a more frigid Muse. Boccaccio turned their attention to the more
sublime and graceful models of Greece.
From this time, the admiration of learning and genius became almost an
idolatry among the people of Italy. Kings and republics, cardinals and
doges, vied with each other in honouring and flattering Petrarch.
Embassies from rival States solicited the honour of his instructions. His
coronation agitated the Court of Naples and the people of Rome as
much as the most important political transaction could have done. To
collect books and antiques, to found professorships, to patronise men of
learning, became almost universal fashions among the great. The spirit
of literary research allied itself to that of commercial enterprise. Every
place to which the merchant princes of Florence extended their gigantic
traffic, from the bazars of the Tigris to the monasteries of the Clyde,
was ransacked for medals and manuscripts. Architecture, painting, and
sculpture, were munificently encouraged. Indeed it would be difficult to
name an Italian of eminence, during the period of which we speak, who,
whatever may have been his general character, did not at least affect a
love of letters and of the arts.
Knowledge and public prosperity continued to advance together. Both
attained their meridian in the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent. We
cannot refrain from quoting the splendid passage, in which the Tuscan
Thucydides describes the state of Italy at that period. "Ridotta tutta in
somma pace e tranquillita, coltivata non meno ne' luoghi piu montuosi
e piu sterili che nelle pianure e regioni piu fertili, ne sottoposta ad altro
imperio che de' suoi medesimi, non solo era abbondantissima d'
abitatori e di ricchezze; ma illustrata sommamente dalla magnificenza
di molti principi, dallo splendore di molte nobilissime e bellissime citta,
dalla sedia e maesta della religione, fioriva d' uomini prestantissimi

nell' amministrazione delle cose pubbliche, e d'ingegni molto nobili in
tutte le scienze, ed in qualunque arte preclara ed industriosa." When we
peruse this just and splendid description, we can scarcely persuade
ourselves that we are reading of times in which the annals of England
and France present us only with a frightful spectacle of poverty,
barbarity, and ignorance. From the oppressions of illiterate masters, and
the sufferings of a degraded peasantry, it is delightful to turn to the
opulent and enlightened States of Italy, to the vast and magnificent
cities, the ports, the arsenals, the villas, the museums, the libraries, the
marts filled with every article of comfort or luxury, the factories
swarming with artisans, the Apennines covered with rich cultivation up
to their very summits, the Po wafting the harvests of Lombardy to the
granaries of Venice, and carrying back the silks of Bengal and the furs
of Siberia to the palaces of Milan. With peculiar pleasure, every
cultivated mind must repose on the fair, the happy, the glorious
Florence, the halls which rang with the mirth of Pulci, the cell where
twinkled the midnight lamp of Politian, the statues on which the young
eye of Michael Angelo glared with the frenzy of a kindred inspiration,
the gardens in which Lorenzo meditated some sparkling song for the