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To the appendix on the Greeks we have very little to say; it is, generally speaking, taken from the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; here and there, indeed, Mr. Berington seems to hold an opinion of his own; but the points on which he departs, and the little which he differs, from the author of the Decline and Fall, are so very few and so very trifling, that they hardly deserve to be noticed. However, in the hurry of the narrative, and the quantity of the materials, Mr. Berington is not always happy in the choice of the circumstances he relates, and sometimes he leaves out those, the omission of which may cause a considerable alteration in the mind of his reader.

The following may serve as a specimen.

"The reign of Palæologus contains little, which is worthy of record, in this view of Grecian letters. He provoked the censures of his own church, by the cruel treatment of John Lascaris; and incurred the displeasure of that church, by insincere attempts to effect an union with the church of Rome. He was justly apprehensive of an attack from the West, particularly from Charles of Anjou, the powerful king of the Sicilies; and in order to avert it, policy dictated, that the friendship of the Roman bishop, who was now the sovereign lord of the western world, should be conciliated, by submission to the terms of his communion." P. 614.

Now the real cause which actually averted the impending storm, was the assistance which Palæologus gave to Peter, King of Arragon, to claim the island of Sicily, of the right of his wife, bequeathed her by Corradin her brother, when Charles sent him to the scaffold. Persuaded by Procida, that the King of Sicily, having the war in his own kingdom, could not have the power of assaulting Constantinople, Michael sent a confidential agent to the Pope, who being already displeased with Charles, eagerly embraced the opportunity of revenging himself. The Sicilian vespers were the result of this assistance; by them Charles lost the kingdom of Sicily, and eight thousand of his best troops; and a war of twenty years could not restore to the house of Angioù the crown which by this revolution had been placed on the head of Peter of Arragon.

In the second appendix upon the Arabian learning, Mr. Berington has such sure guides, that the task we have left is simply that of applause. Indeed, Sir W. Jones, Scales, Gibbon, Cassiri, and Andres have so much exhausted the subject, that a writer who follows their steps is sure to be, if not profound, at least correct. But the quantity of matter which Mr. Berington has had to compress within a small compass, occasionally produces a chasm in this appendix, which is not very easy to be filled. We shall subjoin a specimen.

It is notorious that long before and long after Mahomet, the Arabians were illiterate and ignorant. A few uncouth verses, transmitted by tradition, contained the whole of their erudition; and it was but few years before the Hegyra, that Moramera, a citizen of Ambara, invented the Arabic characters. Indeed, Mahomet was so fully convinced of the incompatibility of philosophy and religion, that he decreed the punishment of death to those who should cultivate liberal arts. The Koran had already been established for more than a century, he himself had long been no more, and some of his followers, animated by the same spirit which had inflamed their prophet, threatened to impale every person who should follow the detested example of the Caliph Almanon, who had begun to recal sciences and learning into his dominions. That is indisputable. Now, if such was the intolerance and the tenets of the Moslems at that time, the reader must be rather surprised at seeing the Arabs all at once laying aside this important point of their creed, and submit to the will of their Caliphs in cultivating arts and sciences.

Mr. Berington is totally silent on the matter, and in a production like his we consider the subject to be of the utmost importance; indeed, he has been generally very careful in the whole history to account for any decay or improvement in literature, so that we have always considered this to have been his forte; and we are at a loss, in the present instance, to imagine the reason of this departure from a plan, which he has so reasonably adopted and in general so faithfully followed.

We shall fill up the omission as briefly as possible; and among the many causes which might be assigned to explain the singularity of this phenomenon, we shall mention what to us appears the principal one. A great part of the inhabitants of Arabia were Christians; and they either followed the pursuits of commerce, which rendered them important by making them rich, or exercised the healing art of medicine, equally useful to the Prince and to the Priest, to his heretic as well as his orthodox subjects; and consequently by the necessary superiority which at all times knowledge will have over ignorance, the Sa racens could not help feeling for them esteem and veneration. This importance and this veneration must have been increased still more, when they saw their Caliphs learn from these objects of their esteem, those very arts and qualifications which they had already begun to look upon with respect; and thus tlie hatred of the Moslems becoming by degrees less violent, reconciled them at last to see a public school raised by the side of a

mosque.

In In page 691, where Mr. Berington refers to the Arabians the invention of gunpowder and paper, we are somewhat surprised that he has not also mentioned the mariner's compass and the application of the pendulum to measure time. The first is re ported by Tiraboschi and by Andres, and proved by a criticism on the works of Albertus Magnus, besides some Arabian MSS.:de arte nautica, reported by Cassiri in Bibli, Arabico-hispana. The second originates from a letter of Dr. Barnard of Oxford to the Rev. Dr. Huntington, Master of Trinity College, in the same University. This letter was afterwards inserted in the number 158 of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Academy, and vindicated by Fabricius Biblioth. Græc. li. III. There is also something on the same subject published by Bayer dissert. but we have not been able to consult the work.

*

Such is the character of the book which now lies before us; and from what has been said, and the extracts which have been given, the reader may be able to form a proper judgment of its merits and faults. The former, indeed, are by far the most abundant, whether we consider the manliness of style, the elegance of lan guage, or the principles of sound philosophy. His vietvs also upon the subject of religion are as mild and tolerant as could reasonably have been expected. As to the faults for the produc tions of men must have faults-we have already remarked those we thought the most important; and in regard to the rest, they are such that may be easily forgiven. But that which has displeased us the most, is the want of connexion through the whole book, by which the reader if left to himself to join together the different links of this long and comprehensive chain. First of all, sometimes Mr. Berington hardly touches upon that which is necessary to be known, and in the second place, he says it in such a way, that very few of his readers will be able to find out the connexion. Well persuaded of the truth of his theory, he thinks that as the connexion is obvious to himself, it must be apparent to the reader. For this reason he is rather too fond of giving an abstract result of his meditations or of his labours, and in endeavouring to be short and concise, he is sometimes bscure, at other times superficial, and often he leaves a blank

The object of Barnard in this letter was to give a proper idea of the progress of the abstract sciences amongst the Arabians, with whose language and literature he was most particularly acquainted. After having spoken of their knowledge in astronomy, of the elegance and accuracy of the instruments they employed, and of the method with which they made their observations, he adds !!.. Imo, mirabere, (tempus) fili penduli vibrationibus jam pridem distinxerent et mensurarint, &c. &c.

in the mind of his reader, though we give the credit of believing it well filled up in his own.

Thus, for instance, is the excellent appendix on the Arabians of Spain, and the account, such as it is, of the Troubadours, the advantages which Italy and Europe derived from them are not easily explained, although they may all be justly enumerated, the reader is left to himself to account for the benefits which they produced on the state of science. Now a single paragraph added to the end of the third book in the life of Gebert, who was afterwards Pope Silvester II. and three or even four more paragraphs inserted at the beginning of the fifth book on such subjects as the origin, employment, pursuits, &c. of the Troubadours, would have remedied this evil. The reader would have then been acquainted with the fact, that Gebert, though he were amongst the first, yet he was not the only person who had gone into Spain to be instructed in the schools of the Saracens; that this fashion, which had existed before this Pope, acquired an additional weight when he was raised to the chair of St. Peter; that many of the Christians, animated by his example, went into Spain in search of knowledge, just as their ancestors had gone into Italy and France; that in this way the learning of the Moors became the origin of the literature of Italy, particularly as the langue Romance being common to the whole of France, as well as to a great portion of Spain, the Troubadours had in many respects the opportunity of imitating and adopting the manner and style of their learned neighbours. In knowing so much, the reader would have then been able to comprehend how learning was imported from Spain into Italy, and why the style of these poets of Provence, of the early Sicilian writers, and generally of all the Italians who preceded Petrarca, and even, in some measure, of Petrarca himself borders so much on the style of the Spanish Moors; he would have, known why Dante has, in one instance, made use of more than one language in his Divina Commedia; and he would have found out how Boccaccio gained the subjects of many of his tales.

We consider these reflections so much the more necessary, as the stupidity of the Spanish court and clergy, immediately after the expulsion of the Moors, was such as to look upon and condemn the literature of the Saracens in the same way as they did their religion; and this fact, while it accounts for the decline of literature in Spain, explains also the cause of the revival of learning in the rest of Europe.

Besides the paragraphs which we have just noticed, we should have been very glad if Mr. Berington, in relating some encouragement given to literature, and the measures adopted to promote its cause, had also mentioned the origin of those great

works,

works, which, even to these days, command our admiration. A sentence or two occasionally interspersed would have perfectly answered this end. For instance: in page 469, where Cosmo de Medici is introduced, styled il Padre della Patria and its Maecenas, we should have been very much gratified to have found also mentioned the compilation of the Vocabolario della Crusca, the best work of the kind that has ever been published, from which the other nations of Europe have taken the pattern to compile their own, and which was begun under the auspices of this prince.

In the life of Nicholas V. we have already remarked another omission of the same description in regard to the origin of the celebrated Corona, which has been of a very great use, and forms still a very high authority among the variorum editions of the classics, &c. &c. &c.

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In general, though we may be obliged to own that Mr. Berington is not always full and correct in point of facts, yet it cannot be doubted that he is always very philosophical and acute in perceiving and explaining the causes of most of the events which produced the revival of learning. In any case we are to consider that the subject which he has embraced is so extensive, that instead of condemning his errors and deficiences, which, at worst, are but few, we should be rather inclined to admire that which in so much larger a proportion, he has so excellently performed.

Upon the whole we consider the History of the Middle Ages one of the best and most valuable productions in this depart ment of literature, which have issued from the English press within this last few years. We most earnestly recommend it to the reader who wishes to be acquainted with this interesting and very much neglected branch of history. We hope that the learned author will meet, from the liberality of the nation, with that encouragement which his labours so justly deserve; and, at the same time, we trust, that he will no longer delay to present to the public any other productions which he may have by him in manuscript, and especially the History of the Papal Power. By the extracts he has given in the volume before us, he has excited our curiosity and interest; and we shall be happy at all times to meet him in our path to combat with respect those principles in which we disagree, and to pay our just tribute of applause to what we can with safety admire and recommend.

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