yet it seemed to be a voluntary abstaining from an appeal to the passions of the multitude, and passed better without censure than the same sense in a modern dress. Influence of litera ture. 73. The influence of literature on the public mind was already very considerable. All kinds of reading had become deeper and more diffused. Pedantry is the usual, perhaps the inevitable, consequence of a genuine devotion to learning, not surely in each individual, but in classes and bodies of men. And this was an age of pedants. To quote profusely from ancient writers seemed to be a higher merit than to rival them; they furnished both authority and ornament, they did honour to the modern, who shone in these plumes of other birds with little expense of thought, and sometimes the actual substance of a book is hardly discernible under this exuberance of rich incrustations. Tacitus, Sallust, Cicero, and Seneca (for the Greeks were in comparison but little read), and many of the Latin poets, were the books that, directly, or by the secondary means of quotation, had most influence over the public opinion. Nor was it surprising that the reverence for antiquity should be still undiminished; for, though the new literature was yielding abundant crops, no comparison between the ancients and moderns could as yet fairly arise. Montaigne, fearless and independent as he was, gave up altogether the pretensions of the latter; yet no one was more destined to lead the way to that renunciation of the authority of the former which the seventeenth century was to witness. He and Machiavel were the two writers who produced the greatest effect upon this age. Some others, such as Guevara and Castiglione, might be full as much read, but they did not possess enough of original thought to shape the opinions of mankind. And the former two, to whom we may add Rabelais, seem to be the only writers of the sixteenth century, setting aside poets and historians, who are now much read by the world. CHAPTER I. HISTORY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE IN EUROPE, FROM 1600 TO 1650. SECT. I. Decline of merely Philological, especially Greek, Learning-Casaubon-Viger - Editions of Greek and Latin Classics-Critical Writings-Latin Style -Scioppius - Vossius-Successive Periods of modern Latinists. less philo 1. In every period of literary history, if we should listen to the complaints of contemporary writers, all Learning of learning and science have been verging towards 17th century extinction. None remain of the mighty, the race logical. of giants is no more; the lights that have been extinguished burn in no other hands; we have fallen on evil days, when letters are no longer in honour with the world, nor are they cultivated by those who deserve to be honoured. Such are the lamentations of many throughout the whole sixteenth century; and with such do Scaliger and Casaubon greet that which opened upon them. Yet the first part of the seventeenth century may be reckoned eminently the learned age; rather, however, in a more critical and exact erudition with respect to historical fact, than in what is strictly called philology, as to which we cannot, on the whole, rank this so high as the preceding period. Neither Italy nor Germany maintained its reputation, which, as it has been already mentioned, had begun to wane towards the close of the sixteenth century. The same causes were at work, the same preference of studies very foreign to polite letters, metaphysical philosophy, dogmatic theology, patristic or mediæval ecclesiastical history, or, in some countries, the physical sciences, which were rapidly gaining ground. And to these we must add |