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with which the cardinal has branded the age, at least within the precincts of Rome. The laws were either entirely silent, or when they spoke, their voice was not heeded; the admonitions of justice were suspended; interest or corruption, violence or fraud, universally prevailed. These causes were more than enough to rouse the indignation of a writer, less a friend to virtue, to discipline, and to the honour of his church; but Muratori, though he admits the principal facts, is less intemperate in his remarks; and the reader may well indulge in a smile, when he beholds the learned Italian thus seriously labouring to extenuate the severity of Baronius, or to blunt the edge of his invective." P. 184.

The fourth book contains two specimens of the mest legitimate eloquence and sound philosophy in the description of the characters of St. Bernard and the ill-fated Abeilard. The account to which Mr. Berington turns the details of the life of this prodigy of the age, shows how much his mind has been tutored by thought, and how even the least circumstance, if at all connected with the subject, may be used with success. Many are the passages which we should be tempted to extract, being certain that they would gratify our readers in the same proportion as we ourselves have been gratified; but the Procustes' bed on which we are placed, hinders us from following our inclination. However, the origin of one of Our Universities must form an exception, as it may interest our Cambridge readers.

"From the ravages of the Danes, and the insults of the first Normans, this nursery had long lain in obscurity and neglect. It revived about the year 1109, when Henry I. was on the throne; and the circumstances of the event are distinctly marked by contemporary writers. That it was previously in a state approaching to that of total extinction, will appear from the following brief account. Joffred, Abbot of Croyland, intending to rebuild his monastery, which had been lately destroyed by fire, sent master Gislebert, with three other monks, to the manor of Cottenham, near Cambridge. They are said to have been able scholars, skilled in philosophical theorems and other sciences. They went every day to Cambridge, and hired a barn, in which they gave public lectures. The barn, in a short time, could not contain the great concourse of scholars; when they were dispersed over different quarters of the town; and brother Odo, an excellent grammarian and satirist, read grammar, early in the morning, to the boys and younger students, according to Priscian and Remigius his commentator. At one o'clock, brother Terricus, an acute sophist, read Aristotle's logic to the elder class, according to the commen taries of Porphyry and Averoes. At three, brother William gave lectures on Tully's Rhetoric and Quintilian's Institutions; while master Gislebert, who, I should have said, was professor of theology, not understanding English, but very expert in the Latin and

French

French languages, preached to the people on Sundays and holidays! Why the circumstance of master Gislebert's not being understood by the people, qualified him for a preacher, is not explained. Thus,' concludes the historian, from this small source, which has swollen into a great river, we now behold the city of God made glad, and all England rendered fruitful, by many teachers and doctors issuing from Cambridge, as from a most holy paradise." " P. 307.

For the same reason it will not be useless to give a specimen of the taste of the age in light poetry in the following lines of Walter Mapes, the pleasant Archdeacon of Oxford, who has been styled the English Anacreon.

"Mihi est propositum in tabernâ mori,
Vinum sit appositum morientis ori,

Ut dicant, cum venerint angelorum chori :
• Deus sit propitius huic potatori !"

* Poculis accenditur animi lucerna ;
Cor imbutum nectare volat ad superna;
Mihi sapit dulcius vinum in tabernâ,
Quam quod aquâ miscuit præsulis pincerna.

Suum cuique proprium dat natura munus,
Ego nunquam potui scribere jejunus:
Me jejunum vincere posset puer unus ;
Sitim et jejunium odi tanquam funus.
"Tales versus facio quale vinum bibo,
Non possum scribere nisi sumpto cibo;
Nihil valet penitùs quod jejunus scribo,
Nasonem post calices facile præibo.

"Mihi nunquam spiritus prophetiæ datur,
Nisi cum fuerit venter bene satur;

Cum in arce cerebri Bacchus dominatur,

In me Phoebus irruit ac miranda fatur." P.329.

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During the period which is treated in this book, that is about the end of the eleventh century, the first crusade happened. This is too great an event, and too much connected with the history of modern Europe to be passed over in silence; and had Mr. Be rington confined his reflexions upon such expeditions, as far as they influenced or rather retarded the developement of the human mind, we should have had nothing to urge against the position i but when our author considers the Crusades in a political point of view, and denies their having produced any benefit whatever, then we must fairly own that we totally differ from him. For though we agree with Mr. Berington, in regard to the actual detriment which these expeditions were to the cause of literature

and

and arts, by depriving the different governments of Europe, on whose hands every thing depends in a state, of the leisure and means to attend to the progress of both, yet we cannot with our author deny to the crusades the merit which they really possess, of having developed the ideas of commerce, and of having tended to deliver the common order of the people from the feudal yoke. But let us hear Mr. Berington.

"But was the state of letters at all affected by the first, or by the ensuing crusades? I think that it was affected, but to its detri ment. That it suffered at home will hardly be controverted, when we consider the dissipation which it occasioned in the minds of all men, civil and ecclesiastical; and the new temper that was generated, by which all sedentary occupations were suspended, and a mark of reproach fixed upon every undertaking, which did not tend to, or was not connected with, the peculiar military mania of the times. Schools and convents felt the general contagion; if a few employed the sober remonstrances of wisdom, they were unheeded or despised. At the call of their prince Duke Robert, the pupils of Bea deserted their masters; and no eloquence gained hearers but that of the Hermit, or of popular declaimers on the same topic. That this was the case, is sufficiently attested by the histories of the times." P. 268.

To this statement we have not the least objection; and we might add other instances to those which Mr. Berington has produced, if other instances were necessary.

"As to external benefits, I believe there were none; or if any, did they compensate for the depopulation of countries; the waste of treasure; the obscuration of the moral principle with respect to correct views of right and wrong; and the introduction of many foreign vices? It is true, that among the Greeks there was much to learn, and much might have been derived from the Saracens themselves. But in our sottish vanity, we affected to despise the former, because their bodily strength was inferior to our own, and they knew less of the art of war; and to have sought instruction from a Saracen, or to have taken it when offered, might fairly have been deemed an humiliating concession to the enemy, if not a base dereliction of the christian faith. Our ignorance, besides, of the languages of the countries through which we passed, was an insurmountable obstacle to every acquirement; unless where the obser vation of the eye may be supposed to have sufficed. Hence it has been remarked, that a higher degree of splendour and parade which was borrowed from the riches and magnificence of the eastern cities, was introduced into the courts and ceremonies of the Euro, pean princes." P. 268.

Now we should certainly conceive that this higher degree of splendour and parade was certainly of some advantage to Europe.

It developed the ideas of commerce, and opened a free inter course amongst the nations, just as much and perhaps even moré than the journeys to Rome which the Metropolitans were obliged to undertake, in order to take from the shrine of St. Peter the Pallium, which invested them with the fulness of their power; as Mr. Berington has very justly observed, that from these journeys every traveller returned with some additions to his stock of knowledge, though in other respects they were an evil as far as they served to create or to perpetuate a servile dependence on the Roman court.

"Should it be objected to me, that I can discover advantages from this intercourse with Rome and with Romans, and none from the crusades, which promoted more travelling and a much more extensive communication-I reply, that the spirit, the views, the motives, joined to the characters of the men engaged, in both cases, were widely different; and that, therefore, the results could not be the same. On one side, we behold persons of education, of sober and regular conduct and habits, coolly contemplating, as they proceeded or as they sojourned, the manners, the arts, the customs of nations; on the other, we gaze upon a promiscuous multitude of all ages, orders, and professions, rushing forward with the impetuosity of a torrent, and solely intent on plunder, scnsual gratification, or providing the means of subsistence; on destroying the supposed enemy, or, at the best, an accomplishing their vows. Here the disparity is obvious, and it is by no means in favour of the crusades." P. 274.

After what has been said, the reader will be able to judge by himself respecting the accuracy of this comparison. Mr. Berington compares the archbishops and their suites to the promis cuous multitude that composed the crusades, whilst he ought to have compared the advantages which these journeys of the archbishops produced on the mind of their countrymen at home, with the benefits arising from the intercourse which the vessels of the Venetians, Genoese, and all other commercial nations of Europe opened amongst distant countries by means of the crusades.

But let us go on.

"If it be still insisted that some benefits, in domestic, civil, or scientific knowledge, were necessarily communicated to Europe, either by the expeditions themselves, or, at least, owing to our long abode in the East: I ask what those benefits were? or how it happened, that the literary and intellectual aspect of Europe exhibited no striking change, till other causes, wholly unconnected with the crusades, were brought into action? I believe then, that these expeditions were utterly sterile with respect to the arts, to learning, and to every moral advantage; and that they neither retarded the progress of the invading enemy, nor, for a single day, the fate of the eastern empire." P. 269.

We

We will not enter into a discussion whether the crusades alone unconnected with other causes, could have produced any striking changes in Europe; but we may with safety assert, that to the crusades Europe owes the first measures for the abolition of the feudal system, and for delivering the common order of the people, without speaking of the other benefit which they produced in contributing to soften the manners of all the nations of Europe by the introduction of the laws and the spirit of chi valry. It is a fact too well known in history, that many barons, and indeed many kings, in order to fit themselves out for the enterprise, and encounter the expences of such a journey, were ob liged to free many of their vassals, and what is the same thing, allow to many of them the liberty of purchasing some of those rights, of which they had been deprived by the feudal system. This beneficial measure, whatever may be said to the contrary, is the very first which was adopted in favour of the freedom of the common people, so that in course of time it produced the total abolition of the feudal system; and if want of room did not forbid, we might follow all the details which this mania, in many respects absurd and detrimental, produced on the liberties of the people in France, Germany, Italy and England.

We must now, for the present, take our leave of Mr. Berington. In our next number we shall resume with pleasure the task of imparting to our readers the observations we have made on the remaining part of this volume. In the mean time, we have not the slightest hesitation to recommend it to those of our readers, who wish to be acquainted with a branch of literature so interesting in itself, and unfortunately so much neglected by our age and nation.

(To be continued.)

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ART. III. A Geological Essay on the imperfect Evidence in Support of a Theory of the Earth, deducible either from its general Structure or from the Changes produced on its Surface by the Operation of existing Causes. By J. Kidd, M.D. Professor of Chemistry in the University of Oxford. Svo. 269 pp. 9s. Oxford, Parker; London, Rivingtons. 1815. THE extravagancies of geological speculation have long been regarded as the opprobrium of natural science. The very attempt to explain how the world was made has been generally esteemed both daring and irreverent; and it must be confessed that the presumption displayed by certain theorists on this subject has VOL. IV. AUGUST, 1815.

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