J. N. Larned

“ The Ionians, on the other hand, were open as the sea, and had as many moods. They were eminently susceptible to beauty in all its forms, to the charm of change and to novelty. They were ever ready to put any belief or institution to the test of discussion, and were governed as much by ideas as by sentiments. Keenness of intellect, taste in all matters of literature and art, grace in expression, and measure in everything distinguished them above all Greeks. ”

“ At the end of the fifteenth century, Italy was the centre of European civilization: while the other nations were still plunged in a feudal barbarism which seems almost as far removed from all our sympathies as is the condition of some American or Polynesian savages, the Italians appear to us as possessing habits of thought, a mode of life, political, social, and literary institutions, not unlike those of to-day; as men whom we can thoroughly understand, whose ideas and aims, whose general views, resemble our own in that main, indefinable characteristic of being modern. ”

“ What the Lombards and Venetians produced in fine art and literature was of a later birth. Yet the novelists of Lombardy, the Latin lyrists of Garda, the school of romantic and dramatic poets at Ferrara, the group of sculptors and painters assembled in Milan by the Sforza dynasty, the maccaronic Muse of Mantua, the unrivalled magnificence of painting at Venice, the transient splendour of the Parmese masters, the wit of Modena, the learning of the princes of Mirandola and Carpi, must be catalogued among the most brilliant and characteristic manifestations of Italian genius. ”

“ Providence did not permit the whole country, so full of wealth, intelligence, healthy political action—so stocked with powerful cities and an energetic population, to be combined into one free and prosperous commonwealth. The factious ambition of a few grandees, the cynical venality of many nobles, the frenzy of the Ghent democracy, the spirit of religious intolerance, the consummate military and political genius of Alexander Farnese, the exaggerated self-abnegation and the tragic fate of Orange, all united to dissever this group of flourishing and kindred provinces. ”

“ We must not think, on the one hand, that great men, heroes, or whatever we please to call them, can direct the course of history according to their own will and pleasure, perhaps according to their mere caprice, with no danger of their will being thwarted, unless it should run counter to the will of some other great man or hero of equal or greater power. ... On the other hand, we must not deem that the course of history is so governed by general laws, that it is so completely in bondage to almost mechanical powers, that there is no room for the free agency of great men and of small men too. ”

“ A talent for History may be said to be born with us, as our chief inheritance. In a certain sense all men are historians. Is not every memory written quite full with Annals, wherein joy and mourning, conquest and loss manifoldly alternate; and, with or without philosophy, the whole fortunes of one little inward Kingdom, and all its politics, foreign and domestic, stand ineffaceably recorded? ”

“ The closing of the mints of British India to the coinage of silver coins of full-debt-paying power is the most momentous event in the monetary history of the present century. It is the final and disastrous blow to the use of silver as a measure of value and as money of full-debt-paying power, and the relegation of it to the position of a subsidiary, or token metal. It is the culmination of the evolution from a silver to a gold standard which has been progressing with startling rapidity in recent years. ”

“ Bordeaux was stormed and sacked, and all Aquitaine was given up to the ravages of the unsparing Moslem host. Eudes fled, a helpless fugitive, to his enemies the Franks, and besought the aid of the great palace-mayor, Karl Martel, practical sovereign of the Frankish kingdoms, and father of the Pippin who would soon become king in name as well as in fact. But, not for Aquitaine, only, but for all Gaul, all Germany,—all Christendom in Europe,—Karl and his Franks were called on to rally and do battle against the sons of the desert, whose fateful march of conquest seemed never to end. ”

“ Had London merely surrendered to the East-Saxons and retained its older population and municipal life, it is hard to imagine how, within less than half a century, its burghers could have so wholly lost all trace of Christianity that not even a ruined church, as at Canterbury, remained for the use of the Christian bishop, and that the first care of Mellitus was to set up a mission church in the midst of a heathen population. It is even harder to imagine how all trace of the municipal institutions to which the Roman towns clung so obstinately should have so utterly disappeared. ”

“ In common with Natural Philosophy it has its value, I will not say as Science, for that would be to use a term which has now become equivocal, but it has a value analogous to the value of science; a value as something that is worth knowing and retaining in the knowledge for its own and for the truth's sake. And in this consists its especial attraction for its own votaries. It is not the pleasure of knowing something that the world does not know,—that doubtless is a motive that weighs with many minds, a motive to be accepted as a fact, though it may not be worth analysis. ”

“ The Migrations of the Hellenic tribes in the Peninsula. "If there is any point in the annals of Greece at which we can draw the line between the days of myth and legend and the beginnings of authentic history, it is at the moment of the great migrations. Just as the irruption of the Teutonic tribes into the Roman empire in the 5th century after Christ marks the commencement of an entirely new era in modern Europe, so does the invasion of Southern and Central Greece by the Dorians, and the other tribes whom they set in motion, form the first landmark in a new period of Hellenic history. ”

“ They formed an intermediate class between the prime and the refuse of the people. Gathered together by the hope of booty, indifferent what end was assigned them, rendered wild by hunger and tardy pay, left without a master after the death of their commander, they found themselves unrestrained in the most luxurious city of the world—a city abounding with gold and riches, and at the same time decried for centuries in Germany, as the infernal nest of the popes, who lived there as incarnate devils, in the midst of their Babylonian doings. ”

“ That city, which, since the fall of Jerusalem, had been for a century the capital of the Latin kingdom, was now become the last refuge of the Christian population of Palestine. Its defences were strong, its inhabitants numerous; but any state of society more vicious, disorderly, and helpless than its condition, can scarcely be imagined. Within its walls were crowded a promiscuous multitude, of every European nation, all equally disclaiming obedience to a general government, and enjoying impunity for every crime under the nominal jurisdiction of independent tribunals. ”

“ An alarmed Mayor of Belfast, appealing to the Government for military aid, was informed that no more serious and more formidable assistance could be rendered to the chief city of the North than might be given by half a troop of dismounted cavalry and half a troop of invalids. If the French-American enemy would consent to be scared by such a muster, well and good; if not Belfast, and for the matter of that, all Ireland, must look to itself. ”

“ As Alexander passed conquering through Asia, he restored to the East, as garnered grain, that Greek civilisation whose seeds had long ago been received from the East. Each conqueror in turn, the Macedonian and the Roman, bowed before conquered Greece and learnt lessons at her feet. To the modern world too Greece has been the great civiliser, the oecumenical teacher, the disturber and regenerator of slumbering societies. She is the source of most of the quickening ideas which re-make nations and renovate literature and art. ”

“ This leader, the Great Conspirator, was Joseph Mazzini, one of the half dozen supreme influences in European politics during the nineteenth century, whose career will interest posterity as long as it is concerned at all in our epoch of transition. For just as Metternich was the High Priest of the Old Regime, so Mazzini was the Prophet of a Social Order, more just, more free, more spiritual than any the world has known. He was an Idealist who would hold no parley with temporizers, an enthusiast whom half-concessions could not beguile: and so he came to be decried as a fanatic or a visionary. ”

“ To the free States of America we owe our best assurance that the oldest, the most famous, the most cherished of human institutions are not the life, nor would their fall be the death, of social man; that all which comes of Charlemagne, and all which comes of Constantine, might go to the tombs of Charlemagne and Constantine, and yet social duty and affection, religion and worship, free obedience to good government, free reverence for just laws, continue as before. ”

“ Under his wise rule and that of his immediate successors, the south of Italy and Sicily enjoyed a transient gleam of prosperity and happiness. Their equal and tolerant government, far surpassing anything at that day in Europe, enabled the Saracen, the Greek, and the Italian to live together in harmony elsewhere unknown. Trade and industry flourished, the manufacture of silk enriched the inhabitants, and the kingdom of Naples was at peace until she was crushed under the iron heel of a Teutonic conqueror. ”

“ After weary hours of hope for the help from Meerut which never came, the British officers in command were compelled to recognise that the only chance of safety lay in flight. Ere the day closed, every European who had risen that morning in Delhi, was dead, or awaiting death, or wandering about the country in the desperate endeavor to reach a place of safety. A day dark with disaster was, however, illumined by the first of those heroic acts which will make the siege of Delhi immortal. The insurgents had their first taste of the quality of the race whose ascendancy they had elected to assail. ”

“ It is a singular spectacle to behold a nation dispersed in every region of the world, without a murmur or repugnance, submitting to the regulations, and taxing themselves to support the greatness, of a supremacy which rested solely on public opinion, and had no temporal power whatever to enforce its decrees. It was not long before the Rabbins, who had been hunted down with unrelenting cruelty, began to creep forth from their places of concealment. ”

“ Brahmanism is a religion which may be described as all theology, for it makes God everything, and everything God. Buddhism is no religion at all, and certainly no theology, but rather a system of duty, morality, and benevolence, without real deity, prayer or priest. The name Buddha is simply an epithet meaning the perfectly enlightened one,' or rather one who, by perfect knowledge of the truth, is liberated from all existence, and who, before his own attainment of Nirvana, or 'extinction,' reveals to the world the method of obtaining it. ”

“ These three regenerating centuries gave an impulse to architecture, which soon awakened the other fine arts. The republican spirit which now fermented in every city, and gave to each of them constitutions so wise, magistrates so zealous, and citizens so patriotic, and so capable of great achievements, had found in Italy itself the models which had contributed to its formation. The war of investitures had given wing to this universal spirit of liberty and patriotism in all the municipalities of Lombardy, in Piedmont, Venetia, Romagna, and Tuscany. ”