J. N. Larned

“ For two or three centuries the annals of Florence are naught, one thinks in reading them, but an unbroken tale of strife within, or war without--of tumult, riot, revolution, disorder. And yet, underneath, there is an amazing story to be found, of thrift, industry, commerce, prosperity, wealth, on one side, and of the sublimest genius, on another, giving itself, in pure devotion, to poetry and art. The contradiction of circumstances seems irreconcilable to our modern experience, and we have to seek an explanation of it in the very different conditions of mediæval life. ”

“ The double terror of rebellion at home and the Church's curse at length broke down the passionate pride of Henry. Humbled and helpless, he crossed the Alps in midwinter, groping among the bleak precipices and ice-fields,--the peasants passing him in a rude sledge of hide down those dreadful slopes,--and went to beg absolution of Gregory at the mountain castle of Canossa. History has few scenes more dramatic than that which shows the proud, irascible, crest-fallen young sovereign confronted with the fiery, little, indomitable old man. ”

“ After the terrible night of the middle-age, and the dolorous legends of spirits and the damned, it was a delight to see again Olympus shining upon us from Greece; its heroic and beautiful deities once more ravishing the heart of men, they raised and instructed this young world by speaking to it the language of passion and genius; and the age of strong deeds, free sensuality, bold invention, had only to follow its own bent, in order to discover in them the eternal promoters of liberty and beauty. Nearer still was another paganism, that of Italy ”

“ The age of Elizabeth was distinguished beyond, perhaps, any other in our history by a number of great men, famous in different ways, and whose names have come down to us with unblemished honours: statesmen, warriors, divines, scholars, poets, and philosophers; Raleigh, Drake, Coke, Hooker, and--high and more sounding still, and still more frequent in our mouths--Shakespear, Spenser, Sidney, Bacon, Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher, men whom fame has eternised in her long and lasting scroll, and who, by their words and acts, were benefactors of their country, and ornaments of human nature. ”

“ In no other man on record were so many virtues disfigured by so little alloy. A saint without superstition, a scholar without ostentation, a warrior all whose wars were fought in the defence of his country, a conqueror whose laurels were never stained by cruelty, a prince never cast down by adversity, never lifted up to insolence in the day of triumph--there is no other name in history to compare with his. Saint Lewis comes nearest to him in the union of a more than monastic piety with the highest civil, military, and domestic virtues. ”

“ The Barbarians Swarming in. The Empire was now like a dying quarry, pulled down by fierce hunting packs and torn on every side. The Goths were at its throat; the tribes of Germany--Sueves, Vandals, Burgundians, Alans--had leaped the Rhine (A. D. 406) and swarmed upon its flanks, throughout Gaul and Spain. The inrush began after Stilicho, to defend Italy against Alaric and Radagaisus, had stripped the frontiers of troops. Sueves, Vandals, and Alans passed slowly through the provinces, devouring their wealth and making havoc of their civilization as they went. ”

“ She could still point with pride to her generals and soldiers, although the army, which, if brave as ever, had gradually sunk from the worship of the country and liberty to that of glory, and from the worship of glory to that of riches, was corrupt and degenerate; but where were her great citizens? Where were her great orators, her great politicians, her great philosophers, her great writers of every kind? Where, at least, were their descendants? All who had shown a spark of genius or pride had been sacrificed for the benefit of a single man. ”

“ He was seldom engaged in any general action, and never undertook any considerable siege, excepting that of Pavia, which, in fact, was little more than a protracted blockade. But, during forty-six years of almost unintermitted warfare, he swept over the whole surface of Europe, from the Ebro to the Oder, from Bretagne to Hungary, from Denmark to Capua, with such a velocity of movement, and such a decision of purpose, that no power, civilized or barbarous, ever provoked his resentment without rapidly sinking beneath his prompt and irresistible blows. ”

“ Of all men, Frederick the Second might have been expected to be the founder of something, the beginner of some new era, political or intellectual. He was a man to whom some great institution might well have looked back as its creator, to whom some large body of men, some sect or party or nation, might well have looked back as their prophet or founder or deliverer. But the most gifted of the sons of men has left behind him no such memory, while men whose gifts cannot bear a comparison with his are reverenced as founders by grateful nations, churches, political and philosophical parties. ”

“ Not strangely, after this pitiful exhibition, the Austrians--all Europe, indeed--held the military power of France in the utmost contempt. ... But now the national danger stirred France to its inmost depths. French spirit was thoroughly roused. The country rose as one man, determined to offer a steadfast, stubborn front to its foes. Stout-hearted leaders, full of boundless energy and enthusiasm, summoned all the resources of the nation to stem and roll back the tide of invasion. Immediate steps were taken to put the defeated and disgraced armies of the frontier upon a new footing. ”

“ Of all the legacies for which we have to thank Florence, none are so well known and so universally recognized as the treasures of art created by her sons, many of which yet remain within her walls, the marvel and delight of all who behold them. As the Florentines were ready to try experiments in politics, manufactures, and commerce, so also in all branches of the fine arts they tried experiments, left the old, beaten paths of their forefathers, and created something original, useful, and beautiful for themselves. ”

“ The nation, speaking generally, was tired of a military despotism; tired of Puritan austerity; tired of revolution and political uncertainty;--so tired that it threw itself down at the feet of the most worthless member of the most worthless royal family in its history, and gave itself up to him without a condition or a guarantee. For twenty-five years it endured both oppression and disgrace at his hands. It suffered him to make a brothel of his Court; to empty the national purse into the pockets of his shameless mistresses and debauched companions; to revive the ecclesiastical tyranny of Laud ”

“ It is indeed hardly too much to say that the advantage of the Treaty was received only by France, and that the only object Napoleon can have had in signing it was to inflict more harm on Prussia than he could inflict by simply continuing the war. Such was the downfall of Prussia. The tremendousness of the catastrophe strikes us less because we know that it was soon retrieved, and that Prussia rose again and became greater than ever. But could this recovery be anticipated? A great nation, we say, cannot be dissolved by a few disasters; patriotism and energy will retrieve everything. ”

“ That accomplished, he speedily brought England into the League, enlarging it to a "grand alliance" of all western Europe against the dangerous monarch of France, and inspiring it with some measure of his own energy and courage. France had now to deal with enemies on every side. They swarmed on all her frontiers, and the strength and valor with which she met them were amazing. For three years the French more than held their own, not only in land-fighting, but on the sea, where they seemed likely, for a time, to dispute the supremacy of the English and the Dutch with success. ”

“ Mirror of princes! Indigent renown Might range the starry ether for a crown Equal to his deserts, who, like the year, Pours forth his bounty, like the day doth cheer, And awes like night, with mercy-tempered frown. Ease from this noble miser of his time No moment steals; pain narrows not his cares-- Though small his kingdom as a spark or gem, Of Alfred boasts remote Jerusalem, And Christian India, through her widespread clime, In sacred converse gifts with Alfred shares.'" Thomas Hughes, Alfred the Great, chapter 24. ”

“ But Louis XIV.'s reign has better titles than the adulations of courtiers and the eulogies of wits and poets to the attention of posterity. It marks one of the most memorable epochs in the annals of mankind. It stretches across history like a great mountain-range, separating ancient France from the France of modern times. On the farther slope are Catholicism and feudalism in their various stages of splendour and decay--the France of crusade and chivalry, of St. Louis and Bayard. On the hither side are free-thought, industry, and centralization--the France of Voltaire, Turgot and Condorcet. ”

“ From the beginning of its remarkable dynastic career, the House of Austria was in all respects quite at one side of the great people whose crown had unhappily passed to its keeping. The emperor-kings, throned with less reality at Vienna than at Presburg and Prague, lost more and more their German character, receded more and more from the range of German influence. Thus Germany was robbed again of the centralizing constraints which a vigorous, rising monarchy of the true stamp, not falsified by a fictitious imperialization, would have brought to bear upon it, for the unifying of a great nation. ”

“ There seems to be no doubt that the long conflict of races and religions in the peninsula affected the character of the Spanish Christians more profoundly, both for good and for ill, than it affected the people with whom they strove. It hardened and energized them, preparing them for the bold adventures they were soon to pursue in a new-found world, and for a lordly career in all parts of the rounded globe. It embittered and gave fierceness to a sentiment among them which bore some likeness to religion, but which was, in reality, the partisanship of a church, and not the devotion of a faith. ”

“ But all the diseases, political and social, which the Republic engendered in itself, had been steadily consuming the state, with their virulence even increased, since it took on the imperial constitution. All that imperialism did was to gather waning energies in hand, and make the most of them for external use. It stopped no decay. The industrial palsy, induced by an ever-widening system of slave-labor, continued to spread. Production decreased; the sum of wealth shrunk in the hands of each succeeding generation; and yet the great fortunes and great estates grew bigger from age to age. ”

“ While the envoys of the Court of Berlin were in a state of such squalid poverty as moved the laughter of foreign capitals; while the food placed before the princes and princesses of the blood-royal of Prussia was too scanty to appease hunger, and so bad that even hunger loathed it, no price was thought too extravagant for tall recruits. The ambition of the king was to form a brigade of giants, and every country was ransacked by his agents for men above the ordinary stature. ... Though his dominant passion was the love of military display, he was yet one of the most pacific of princes. ”

“ No stranger turn of fortune can be pictured than that which, on the threshold of the modern era, linked the nobles of France in their last struggle for independence with the fortunes of a rapacious and fraudulent financier, nor can anything be more suggestive of the character of the coming epoch than the sight of this last battle fought, not in the field of arms, but before a court of law. To Colbert, the fall of Fouquet was but the necessary preliminary to that reform of every branch of the administration which had been ripening in his mind ever since he had entered the public service. ”

“ The history of the next thirty years--the last generation of republican Rome--is a sad and sinister but thrilling chronicle of the strifes and intrigues, the machinations and corruptions, of a stupendous and wicked game in politics that was played, against one another and against the Republic, by a few daring, unscrupulous players, with the empire of the civilized world for the stake between them. ”

“ The shattered remains of Italian civilisation might be collected, and Paris might receive the men whom Italy could no longer employ. The French returned to France empty of honour, gorged with plunder, satiated with rape and rapine, boasting of cities sacked, and garrisons put to the sword. They had sucked the lifeblood of Italy, but her death brought new life to France. The impetus thus acquired by art and letters coincided with a change in political and social constitutions. The gradual process of centralisation which had begun with Louis XI. transformed the life of the whole nation. ”

“ The league of King and Commons against the Lords had proved less happy than the alliance in England of Commons and Lords against the King. Royalty emerged from the patient struggle alone in possession of sovereign power. It had used the communes and then abused them, breaking their charters--their liberties--their courage--their hopes--and widening the distance between class and class. The "estates" of the realm became a memory and a name. During five hundred years, while the Parliament of England grew in majesty and might, the States-General of France were assembled but thirteen times. ”