Struck dumb with horror and dismay, he immediately knelt before the prince and presented him with his sword; whereupon Vincenzo, maddened with rage and hate, seized it, and stabbed his chivalrous foe to the heart. Thus, at the early age of twenty-two, fell one whose talents might have rendered him of signal service to mankind. His life reads like some strange fairy tale, and seems almost as unreal, so small was the mark which he actually made. A few Latin verses, and the story, instructive in many ways, and interesting as it is instructive, are all that time. has brought down to us of that vision of the fifteenth century-the Admirable Crichton. THE JTALIAN CITIES OF THE MIDDLE AGES. THEIR EMINENCE IN LITERATURE, ART, AND COMMERCE. VEN at the present | her pontiffs, enjoyed at least compara day, where can we find fairer monuments of all that art can accomplish than at Venice and Florence? what must it have been to see those cities at the height of their grandeur! Let us trace the steps by which they rose, the manner in which they revived an only half-forgotten splendour, for "during the gloomy and disastrous centuries which followed the downfall of the Roman Empire, Italy had preserved, in a far greater degree than any other part of Western Europe, the traces of ancient civilisation. The night which descended upon her was the night of an Arctic summer. The dawn began to reappear before the last reflection of the preceding sunset had faded from the horizon. It was in the time of the French Merovingians and of the Saxon Heptarchy that ignorance and ferocity seemed to have done their worst. Yet even then the Neapolitan provinces, recognising the authority of the Eastern Empire, preserved something of Eastern knowledge and refinement. Rome, protected by the sacred character of tive security and repose. Even in those regions where the sanguinary Lombards had fixed their monarchy, there was incomparably more of wealth, of information, of physical comfort, and of social order, than could be found in Gaul, Britain, or Germany. That which most distinguished Italy from the neighbouring countries was the importance which the population of the towns, at a very early period, began to acquire. Venice, and Genoa, and Florence rose into power, and the feudal lords were too weak to crush them; nay, they became their citizens, and dwelt in their walls. Instead of strengthening their fortresses among the mountains, they embellished their palaces in the market-place. The state of society in the Neapolitan dominions, and in some parts of the Ecclesiastical State, more nearly resembled that which existed in the great monarchies of Europe. But the governments of Lombardy and Tuscany, through all their revolutions, preserved a different character. A people, when assembled in a town, is far more formidable to its rulers than when dispersed over a wide extent of country. The most arbitrary of the Cæsars found it necessary to feed and divert the inhabitants of their unwieldy capital at the expense of the provinces. The citizens of Madrid have more than once besieged their sovereign in his own palace, and extorted from him the most humiliating concessions. The sultans have often been compelled to propitiate the furious rabble of Constantinople with the head of an unpopular vizier. From the same cause there was a certain tinge of democracy in the monarchies and aristocracies of Northern Italy. Thus liberty, partially indeed and transiently, revisited Italy; and with liberty came commerce and empire, science and taste, all the comforts and all the ornaments of life. The Crusades, from which the inhabitants of other countries gained nothing but relics and wounds, brought to the rising commonwealths of the Adriatic and Tyrrhene seas a large increase of wealth, dominion, and knowledge. The moral and geographical position of those commonwealths enabled them to profit alike by the barbarism of the West and by the civilisation of the East. Italian ships covered every sea. Italian factories rose on every shore. The tables of Italian moneychangers were set in every city. Manufactures flourished. Banks were established. The operations of the commercial machine were facilitated by many useful and beautiful inventions. We doubt whether any country of Europe, our own excepted, have at the present time reached 'so high a point of wealth and civilisation as some parts of Italy had attained four hundred years ago. Historians rarely descend to those details from which alone the real state of a community can be collected. Hence posterity is too often deceived by the vague hyperboles of poets and rhetoricians, who mistake the splendour of a court for the happiness of a people. Fortunately, John Villani has given us an ample and precise account of Florence in the early part of the fourteenth century. The revenue of the Republic amounted to three hundred thousand florins; a sum which, allowing for the depreciation of the precious metals, was at least equivalent to six hundred thousand pounds sterling; a larger sum than England and Ireland, two centuries ago, yielded annually to Elizabeth. The manufacture of wool alone employed two hundred factories, and thirty thousand workmen. The cloth annually produced sold, at an average, for twelve hundred thousand florins; a sum fully equal in exchangeable value to two millions and a half of our money. Four hundred thousand florins were annually coined. Eighty banks conducted the commercial operations, not of Florence only, but of all Europe. The transactions of these establishments were sometimes of a magnitude which may surprise even the contemporaries of the Barings and the Rothschilds. Two houses advanced to Edward the Third of England upwards of three hundred thousand marks, at a time when the mark contained more silver than fifty shillings of the present day, and when the value of 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 the 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 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 subTime and graceful models of Greece. no which the merchant princes of Florence extended their gigantic traffic, from the bazaars 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. At a time when 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 From this time, the admiration of summits, the Po wafting the harvests of learning and genius became almost an Lombardy to the granaries of Venice, idolatry among the people of Italy. and carrying back the silks of Bengal Kings and republics, cardinals and and the furs of Siberia to the palaces of doges, vied with each other in honour- Milan. With peculiar pleasure, every ing and flattering Petrarch. Embassies cultivated mind must repose on the fair, from rival states solicited the honour of the happy, the glorious Florence, the his instructions. His coronation agitated halls which rang with the mirth of Pulci, the court of Naples and the people of the cell where twinkled the midnight Rome as much as the most important lamp of Politian, the statues on which political transaction could have done. the young eye of Michael Angelo glared To collect books and antiques, to found with the frenzy of a hundred inspirations, professorships, to patronise men of of the gardens in which Lorenzo meditalearning, became almost universal ted some sparkling song for the Mayfashions among the great. The spirit of day dance of the Etrurian Virgins." literary research allied itself to that of Such was the state of the Italian cities of commercial enterprise. Every place to the middle ages. A LEGEND EGEND OF THE O the traveller by the delicious banks of the Rhine nothing is more interesting than the sight of the grand old castles which, now in ruins, crown every rocky height that rises from the river. To understand this story (which we abridge from Lytton), "you must rebuild those shattered towers in the pomp of old; raise the gallery and the hall; man the battlement with warders, and give the proud banners of ancestral chivalry to wave upon the walls. But above, sloping half down the rock, you must fancy the hanging gardens of Liebenstein, fragrant with flowers, and basking in the noonday sun. On the greenest turf, underneath an oak, there sat three persons, in the bloom of youth. Two of the three were brothers; the third was an orphan girl, whom the lord of the opposite tower of Sternfels had bequeathed to the protection of his brother, the chief of Liebenstein. The castle itself and the demesne that belonged to it passed away from the female line, and became the heritage of Otho, the orphan's cousin, and the younger of the two brothers now seated on the turf. 'And oh,' said the elder, whose name was Warbeck, 'you have twined a chaplet for my brother; have you not, dearest Leoline, a simple flower for me?' The beautiful orphan blushed to her temples, and culling from the flowers in her lap the freshest of the roses, began weaving them into a wreath for Warbeck. RHINE. 'It would be better,' said the gay Otho, to make my sober brother a chaplet of the rue and cypress; the rose is much too bright a flower for so serious a knight.' Leoline held up her hand reprovingly. 'Let him laugh, dearest cousin,' said Warbeck, gazing passionately on her changing cheek: and thou, Leoline, believe that the silent stream runs the deepest.' At this moment, they heard the voice of the old chief, their father, calling aloud for Leoline; for, ever when he returned from the chase, he wanted her gentle presence; and the hall was solitary to him if the light sound of her step, and the music of her voice, were not heard in welcome. Leoline hastened to her guardian, and the brothers were left alone. Nothing could be more dissimilar than the features and the respective characters of Otho and Warbeck. Otho's countenance was flushed with the brown hues of health; his eyes were of the brightest hazel: his dark hair wreathed in short curls round his open and fearless brow; the jest ever echoed on his lips, and his step was bounding as the foot of the hunter of the Alps. Bold and light was his spirit; if at times he betrayed the haughty insolence of youth, he felt generously, and though not ever ready to confess sorrow for a fault, he was at least ready to brave peril for a friend. But Warbeck's frame, though of equal strength, was more slender in its proportions than that of his brother; the fair long hair, that characterised his northern race, hung on either side of a countenance calm and pale, and deeply impressed with thought, even to sadness. |