From The Academy. THE HANSEATIC HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

superintend the new one, the chief labour being entrusted to two young scholars, IN Whitsun-week 1871, a new historical natives of Livonia, and pupils of Professor society was founded at Lübeck, for the pur-Waitz, of Göttingen, Drs. Iöhlbaum and pose of combining once more all those von der Ropp. The most important matecities which, in former ages, had been mem-rials for this collection are extant in the bers of the German Hansa. According to archives of Prussia proper and the Gera resolution passed at the time, invitations man provinces of Russia. The second to join this purely literary resurrection of work, which also will soon be begun, is a the famous old league were sent to no less collection of such documents, charters, dethan ninety-two towns, maritime and in-spatches, and letters, as have a more genland, and including those which long since eral bearing upon the history and adminishave been separated from the body politic tration of the Hanseatic League, and which of Germany- the cities of Livonia and for this reason cannot be printed in the Esthonia, as well as of Holland. At the more local collections issued by the special annual meeting which took place at Lü- historical societies of Lübeck, Hamburg, beck on the 21st and 22nd of May last, a Bremen, Brunswick, Stralsund, Cologne, very interesting report was brought up by &c. A third undertaking was unanimously the council. It states that thirty-eight of adopted by the late gathering. viz., an edithe cities have not only answered in the tion of the oldest version or versions of affirmative, but are willing to contribute, the ancient Lübeck code of laws, to which according to their means, an annual share public attention has been directed by an to support the publications of the society. excellent paper of Professor Frensdorff, of Considerable sums indeed will be forth- Göttingen. Dr. Wehrmann, the principal coming from Hamburg, Bremen, and Lü- archivist at Lübeck, then communicated to beck, from Cologne and Berlin, and from the society his researches on the origin of the principal towns of the Baltic and of the ancient patrician families of that city, Westphalia. Amsterdam, Ilarderwijk, Ven- and their relations with and difference from loo, Deventer, Campen, Arnheim, and even the families of the nobility and gentry. diminutive Bolsward and Zutphen, have Professor Mantels followed with a descripjoined the new fraternity with sums in tion of the ways and means by which the proportion to their respective importance. old Lübeck traders fetched relics of the Eleven other places have expressed their saints from England (Canterbury) and thanks, and added their regret that they from Venice, and Professor Pauli, of Götwere not able to join in the same way; tingen, discussed the early use and the whilst the remaining forty-two have, up to value of the word "Hansa" in English this time, not thought it worth while to documents of the twelfth and thirteenth answer at all. Besides this civic member-centuries. A visit was also made to the ship, there is another individual one, which, old archives, still kept in a lofty chapel of since last years meeting, has risen from St. Mary's Church, called the "Threse" ninety to about 120, a gathering of friends (Thesauraria), and the magnificent char and students of medieval history, govern- ters granted by the Kings of England to ment and city officials, keepers of record Ilansa merchants, beginning with Henry offices, professors of universities and high- III., besides many other documents referschools, merchants, lawyers, artists, &c. ring to the Steelyard in London, were disAn annual payment of two thalers will se- played and commented upon from various cure to each member a copy of the jour-sides. It is not unlikely that our own Pubnal, the first annual number of which is to lic Record Office and the Guildhall Records contain this year's report, and several important contributions to the history and the laws of the Hansa Confederation. During the meeting itself, a circumstantial account was communicated respecting the two chief works which have been taken in hand by the society. The first is to be an edition of the so-called Recesses, i.e., the transactions of the old Hanseatic parliaments, beginning with 1431, as the earlier ones down to that year are already in course of publication under the direction of the Munich Historical Commission. The editor of this first series will likewise

will soon be visited again by some collabo rators of the new society, as the early share which the government and the commerce of England took in the propagation of the Hansa has not yet been adequately elucidated. A proper selection for publication amongst the great masses of documents bearing on the subject can never be made without repeated researches in the stores of such incomparable collections. The next annual gathering of the Hanseatic Historical Society will be held at Brunswick, in Whitsun-week 1873.

No. 1469.-August 3, 1872.

CONTENTS.

1. THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING, Macmillan's Magazine,

259

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or events, had the most influence in turnTHE MIDDLE AGES AND THE REVIVAL ing the thoughts and energies of men into

OF LEARNING.*

BY W. G. CLARK.

PART I.

TOWARDS the close of the fifth century of our era the Roman Empire of the West formally came to an end by the resignation of the puppet-monarch who, by a strange irony of fate, bore the name of Romulus.

new channels, and in remoulding their social and political life after a new pattern. Shall we say the revival of classical literature and art? or the growth of a national literature among the several nations of the West? or the destruction of feudalism? or the change in warfare brought about by the use of artillery? or the invention of printing? or the discovery of America? or the Reformation? It is obvious that the

or other of these events as the point of contrary flexure, marking the end of the mediæval and the beginning of the modern world, in reference to his own special theme, according as he was writing upon forms of government, or military tactics, or letters, or commerce, or art, or religion. And it is equally clear that our modern life is the product of all these in combination, together with many minor events which escape our notice, and many occult forces which defy our penetration.

A certain number, or rather an uncertain number, of centuries which followed, are known in history as "the Middle historian would choose by preference one Ages." Such designations, necessary though they be, are apt to be misleading unless we bear in mind that they are merely conventional terms, adopted for the convenience of the historian, who must mark out his portion of the boundless field, and fix some where his point of departure and his goal. But in using them, we must remember that there are, in fact, no breaks in the long chain of cause and effect; no pauses in the activity of man, any more than in that of nature; no cataclysm and re-creation, but endless evolution; old forms decaying and new forms growing, in obedience to laws which the faith of Science holds to be eternal and immutable, like their Divine Author, even though the complexity of the phenomena may baffle her efforts to classify them and refer them to their causes. The hidden forces which wrought during the Middle Ages, silently and gradually changing the life, the language, and religion of the nations of Western Europe, had been as actively at work for centuries before, undermining and corrupting the whole system, political, social, and religious, of Imperial Rome; and the fall of the last Augustus was an event only important as furnishing a convenient epoch for the conclusion or the beginning of the historian's survey. It is not so easy to agree upon an epoch at which the Middle Ages may be supposed to cease. It may 'be convenient, with some writers, to fix upon the year 1400, which has the advantage of being a round number, and therefore easily remembered. If we want a date which has a more serious justification, we must first inquire what great event, * Two Lectures delivered before the Edinburgh

Literary and Philosophical Institution.

Again, the Middle Ages may be said to have terminated at different times in different countries, according to their advancement in the arts of war and peace. For example, the national literature of Italy owes its rise to the Sicilian poets at the court of Frederick II., at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and to Brunetto Latini and the predecessors of Dante at its close, a hundred years before Wicliff and Chaucer created a literature in England. The origin of French and Provençal literature is still earlier than that of Italy, while the latter country unquestionably takes the lead of all in the revival of classical learning and art. Germany claims the invention of printing, but a national German literature can scarcely be said to have existed before the time of Luther. The Reformation, which really reformed England, Scotland, and North Germany, and profoundly affected France, never gained a serious hold on Italy. In England the civilization begun by Chaucer and Wicliff was quenched by cruel persecution and disastrous civil war, so that the historian of medieval England could not fitly end his task before the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The " Canterbury

For us the Middle Ages mean specially the period which elapsed between the decline of ancient learning and its revival.

Tales" belong to modern literature, but, ent tendencies of the age, most powerfully the Wars of the Roses to the Middle Ages. helped forward in Britain by the genius of On the whole, we cannot say when the Walter Scott, but felt in all the nations of Middle Ages ended, but we may use the Western Europe; and now men are ready term as a convenient notation generally to adore what their fathers would willingly intelligible. We know what "spring have burned. Our architects build houses and "winter " mean, though we cannot say for us after a mediæval pattern, "with when the one begins and the other ends. windows that exclude the light, and pasWe may fix March 21st as a convenient sages that lead to nothing," with battledate, though many a spring-like day may ments and loopholes highly suitable for come before, and many a wintry day after. bow and arrow practice against an assailAnd the snow may lie thick upon the high- ing enemy, but not otherwise useful. And lands long after the violets and primroses one great writer, in his " Past and Present," of the valleys have stolen into bloom. contrasts the thirteenth century as an age of manly earnestness and honest sincerity with our nineteenth century as an age of shams, hypocrisies, and make-believes. But from this point of view the Middle Let us guard against exaggeration on either Ages are commonly called by another side. To affirm that these Middle Ages name which is more questionable "the had no light of reason and conscience for dark ages." Now this might mean the their guide, no culture and no art, is to ages which are dark to us, with respect slander Christianity and natural religion, to which we are in the dark. As a humble to ignore the evidence of extant monuconfession of ignorance this would be un-ments and of history; to say on the other objectionable, only we might have to extend the term to other ages. But it is generally used with a feeling of complacent superiority on the part of the scholar towards people who wrote barbarous Latin and could not read Greek, or on the part of the enlightened Protestant towards benighted Papists. I know not who invented the phrase, but the feeling of contempt which prompted it is very conspicuous in the Italian literature of the Renaissance, Even in the darkest period of the dark and in the French and English literature ages the light of ancient literature and anof the seventeenth and eighteenth centu- cient civilization was never wholly extinries. When John Evelyn sees a great guished. Successive hordes of barbarians cathedral, he condescendingly says that it first wasted and ravaged and held to ranis "Gothic, but fair." The very word som, then conquered and settled in Italy, "Gothic," which to us expresses the most France, and Spain, but they ended by beautiful style of architecture, was first ap- learning the language and adopting the plied in contempt. The term "dark ages manners of the conquered. In Britain, inis frequently used by Gibbon (e.g. iii. 346), deed, the Angles and Saxons swept away who despised them more for what they all trace of Roman culture, but then in all knew than for what they did not know, likelihood Britain had never been so commore for their devotion to Christian theol-pletely romanized as France or Spain, and ogy than for their indifference to ancient its invaders bore a far larger proportion to learning. I believe it was Doctor Johnson who said "I know nothing of those ages which knew nothing," and thought his ignorance a proof of wisdom. But for the last fifty years or more, a great reaction has been in progress, due to many conflu

hand that we must look to them as guides and examples, not only in art, but in politics and religion, is to deny the great consoling doctrine of human progress proclaimed by the poet :

Yet, I doubt not, through the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns."

the native inhabitants. In Italy, France, and Spain, the conquerors, chiefly of Teutonic origin, like those of Britain, and belonging to a race naturally tenacious of old customs, were forced by their paucity of numbers to learn the language of their