Chapter III (1)

ON THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE FROM 1440 TO THE CLOSE OF THE FIFTEENTH
CENTURY.

SECT. I. 1440-1450.

_Classical Literature in Italy--Nicolas V.--Laurentius Valla._

|The year 1440 not chosen as an epoch.|

1. The reader is not to consider the year 1440 as a marked epoch in the annals of literature. It has sometimes been treated as such, by those who have referred the invention of printing to this particular epoch. But it is here chosen as an arbitrary line, nearly coincident with the complete development of an ardent thirst for classical, and especially Grecian, literature in Italy, as the year 1400 was with its first manifestation.

|Continual progress of learning.|

|Nicolas V.|

2. No very conspicuous events belong to this decennial period. The spirit of improvement, already so powerfully excited in Italy, continued to produce the same effects in rescuing ancient manuscripts from the chances of destruction, accumulating them in libraries, making translations from the Greek, and by intense labour in the perusal of the best authors, rendering both their substance and their language familiar to the Italian scholar. The patronage of Cosmo de’ Medici, Alfonso king of Naples, and Nicolas of Este, has already been mentioned. Lionel, successor of the last prince, was by no means inferior to him in love of letters. But they had no patron so important as Nicolas V. (Thomas of Sarzana), who became Pope in 1447; nor has any later occupant of that chair, without excepting Leo X., deserved equal praise as an encourager of learning. Nicolas founded the Vatican library, and left it, at his death in 1455, enriched with 5000 volumes; a treasure far exceeding that of any other collection in Europe. Every scholar who needed maintenance, which was of course the common case, found it at the court of Rome; innumerable benefices, all over Christendom, which had fallen into the grasp of the holy see, and frequently required of their incumbents, as is well known, neither residence, nor even the priestly character, affording the means of generosity, which have seldom been so laudably applied. Several Greek authors were translated into Latin by direction of Nicolas V., among which are the history of Diodorus Siculus, and Xenophon’s Cyropædia, by Poggio,[310] who still enjoyed the office of apostolical secretary, as he had under Eugenius IV., and with still more abundant munificence on the part of the pope; Herodotus and Thucydides by Valla, Polybius by Peroti, Appian by Decembrio, Strabo by Gregory of Tiferno and Guarino of Verona, Theophrastus by Gaza, Plato de Legibus, Ptolemy’s Almagest, and the Præparatio Evangelica of Eusebius, by George of Trebizond.[311] These translations, it has been already observed, will not bear a very severe criticism, but certainly there was an extraordinary cluster of learning round the chair of this excellent pope.

[310] This translation of Diodorus has been ascribed by some of our
writers, even since the error has been pointed out, to John Free,
an Englishman, who had heard the lectures of the younger Guarini in
Italy. Quod opus, Leland observes, Itali Poggio vanissime
attribuunt Florentino. De Scriptor. Britann. p. 462. But it bears
the name of Poggio in the two editions printed in 1472 and 1493;
and Leland seems to have been deceived by some one who had put
Free’s name on a manuscript of the translation. Poggio, indeed, in
his preface, declares that he undertook it by command of Nicolas V.
See Niceron, ix. 158; Zeno, Dissertazioni Vossiane, i. 41;
Ginguéné, iii. 245. Pits follows Leland in ascribing a translation
of Diodorus to Free, and quotes the first words: thus, if it still
should be suggested that this may be a different work, there are
the means of proving it.

[311] Heeren, p. 72.

|Justice due to his character.|

3. Corniani remarks, that if Nicolas V., like some popes, had raised a distinguished family, many pens would have been employed to immortalise him; but not having surrounded himself with relations, his fame has been much below his merits. Gibbon, one of the first to do full justice to Nicolas, has made a similar observation. How striking the contrast between this pope and his famous predecessor Gregory I., who, if he did not burn and destroy heathen authors, was at least anxious to discourage the reading of them! These eminent men, like Michael Angelo’s figures of Night and Morning, seem to stand at the two gates of the middle ages, emblems and heralds of the mind’s long sleep, and of its awakening.

|Poggio on the ruins of Rome.|

4. Several little treatises by Poggio, rather in a moral than political strain, display an observing and intelligent mind. Such are those on nobility, and on the unhappiness of princes. For these, which were written before 1440, the reader may have recourse to Shepherd, Corniani, or Ginguéné. A later essay, if we may so call it, on the vicissitudes of fortune, begins with rather an interesting description of the ruins of Rome. It is an enumeration of the more conspicuous remains of the ancient city; and we may infer from it that no great devastation or injury has taken place since the fifteenth century. Gibbon has given an account of this little tract, which is not, as he shows, the earliest description of the ruins of Rome. Poggio, I will add, seems not to have known some things with which we are familiar; as the Cloaca Maxima, the fragments of the Servian wall, the Mamertine prison, the temple of Nerva, the Giano Quadrifonte; and, by some odd misinformation, believes that the tomb of Cecilia Metella, which he had seen entire, was afterwards destroyed.[312] This leads to a conjecture that the treatise was not finished during his residence at Rome, and consequently not within the present decennium.

[312] Ad calcem postea majore ex parte exterminatum.

|Account of the East, by Conti.|

5. In the fourth book of this treatise, De Varietate Fortunæ, Poggio has introduced a remarkable narration of travels by a Venetian, Nicolo di Conti, who, in 1419, had set off from his country, and after passing many years in Persia and India, returned home in 1444. His account of those regions, in some respects the earliest on which reliance could be placed, will be found rendered into Italian from a Portuguese version of Poggio, in the first volume of Ramusio. That editor seems not to have known that the original was in print.

|Laurentius Valla.|

6. A far more considerable work by Laurentius Valla, on the graces of the Latin language, is rightly, I believe, placed within this period; but it is often difficult to determine the dates of books published before the invention of printing. Valla, like Poggio, had long earned the favour of Alfonso, but, unlike him, had forfeited that of the court of Rome. His character was very irascible and overbearing; a fault too general with the learned of the fifteenth century; but he may, perhaps, be placed at the head of the literary republic at this time; for, if inferior to Poggio, as probably he was, in vivacity and variety of genius, he was undoubtedly above him in what was then most valued and most useful, grammatical erudition.

|His attack on the court of Rome.|

7. Valla began with an attack on the court of Rome, in his declamation against the donation of Constantine. Some have in consequence reckoned him among the precursors of Protestantism; while others have imputed to the Roman see, that he was pursued with its hostility for questioning that pretended title to sovereignty. But neither of these representations is just. Valla confines himself altogether to the temporal principality of the pope; but in this his language must be admitted to have been so abusive as to render the resentment of the court of Rome not unreasonable.[313]

[313] A few lines will suffice as a specimen. O Romani pontifices,
exemplum facinorum omnium cæteris pontificibus, et improbissimi
scribæ et pharisæi, qui sedetis super cathedram Moysi, et opera
Dathan et Abyron facitis, itane vestimenta apparatûs, pompa
equitatus, omnis denique vita Cæsaris, vicarium Christi decebit?
The whole tone is more like Luther’s violence, than what we should
expect from an Italian of the fifteenth century. But it is with the
ambitious spirit of aggrandisement as temporal princes, that he
reproaches the pontiffs; nor can it be denied, that Martin and
Eugenius had given provocation for his invective. Nec amplius
horrenda vox audiatur, partes contra ecclesiam; ecclesia contra
Perusinos pugnat, contra Bononienses. Non contra Christianos pugnat
ecclesia, sed papa. Of the papal claim to temporal sovereignty by
prescription, Valla writes indignantly. Præscripsit Romana
ecclesia; o imperiti, o divini juris ignari. Nullus quantumvis
annorum numerus verum abolere titulum potest. Præscripsit Romana
ecclesia. Tace, nefaria lingua. Præscriptionem quæ fit de rebus
mutis atque irrationalibus, ad hominem transfers; cujus quo
diuturnior in servitute possessio, eo detestabilior.

|His treatise on the Latin language.|

8. The more famous work of Valla, De Elegantiis Latinæ Linguæ, begins with too arrogant an assumption. “These books,” he says, “will contain nothing that has been said by any one else. For many ages past, not only no man has been able to speak Latin, but none have understood the Latin they read: the studious of philosophy have had no comprehension of the philosophers,--the advocates of the orators,--the lawyers of the jurists,--the general scholar of any writers of antiquity.” Valla, however, did at least incomparably more than any one who had preceded him; and it would probably appear, that a great part of the distinctions in Latin syntax, inflection, and synonymy, which our best grammars contain, may be traced to his work. It is to be observed, that he made free use of the ancient grammarians, so that his vaunt of originality must be referred to later times. Valla is very copious as to synonyms, on which the delicate, and even necessary understanding of a language mainly depends. If those have done most for any science who have carried it furthest from the point whence they set out, philology seems to owe quite as much to Valla as to any one who has come since. The treatise was received with enthusiastic admiration, continually reprinted, honoured with a paraphrase by Erasmus, commented, abridged, extracted, and even turned into verse.[314]

[314] Corniani, ii. 221. The editions of Valla de Elegantiis, recorded
by Panzer, are twenty-eight in the fifteenth century, beginning in
1471, and thirty-one in the first thirty-six years of the next.

|Its defects.|

9. Valla, however, self-confident and of no good temper, in censuring the language of others, fell not unfrequently into mistakes of his own. Vives and Budæus, coming in the next century, and in a riper age of philology, blame the hypercritical disposition of one who had not the means of pronouncing negatively on Latin words and phrases, from his want of sufficient dictionaries: his fastidiousness became what they call superstition, imposing captious scruples and unnecessary observances on himself and the world.[315] And of this species of superstition there has been much since his time in philology.

[315] Vives, De Tradendis Disciplinis, i. 478. Budæus observes: Ego
Laurentium Vallensem, egregii spiritus virum, existimo sæculi sui
imperitia offensum primum Latine loquendi consuetudinem constituere
summa religione institisse; deinde judicii cerimonia singulari, cum
profectus quoque diligentiam æquasset, in eam superstitionem sensim
delapsum esse, ut et sese ipse et alios captiosis observationibus
scribendique legibus obligaret. Commentar. in Ling. Græc. p. 26.
(1529). But sometimes, perhaps, Valla is right, and Budæus wrong in
censuring him; as, where he disputes the former’s rule, that two
epithets, not being placed as predicates, cannot be joined in Latin
prose to a substantive without a copula, on no better grounds than
such an usage of the pronoun suus, or a phrase like privata res
maritima in Cicero, where res maritima is in the nature of a single
word, like res publica. The rule is certainly a good one, even if a
few better exceptions can be found.

|Heeren’s praise of it.|

10. Heeren, one of the few who have, in modern times, spoken of this work from personal knowledge, and with sufficient learning, gives it a high character. “Valla was, without doubt, the best acquainted with Latin of any man in his age; yet, no pedantic Ciceronian, he had studied in all the classical writers of Rome. His Elegantiæ are a work on grammar; they contain an explanation of refined turns of expression; especially where they are peculiar to Latin. They display not only an exact knowledge of that tongue, but often also a really philosophical study of language in general. In an age when nothing was so much valued as a good Latin style, yet when the helps, of which we now possess so many, were all wanting, such a work must obtain a great success, since it relieved a necessity which every one felt.”[316]

[316] P. 220.

|Valla’s annotations on the New Testament.|

11. We have to give this conspicuous scholar a place in another line of criticism, that on the text and interpretation of the New Testament. His annotations are the earliest specimen of explanations founded on the original language. In the course of these, he treats the Vulgate with some severity. But Valla is said to have had but a slight knowledge of Greek;[317] and it must also be owned, that with all his merit as a Latin critic, he wrote indifferently, and with less classical spirit than his adversary Poggio. The invectives of these against each other do little honour to their memory, and are not worth recording in this volume, though they could not be omitted in a legitimate history of the Italian scholars.

[317] Annis abhinc ducentis Herodotum et Thucydidem Latinis literis
exponebat Laurentius Valla, in ea bene et eleganter dicendi copia,
quam totis voluminibus explicavit, inelegans tamen, et pæne
barbarus, Græcis ad hoc literis leviter tinctus, ad auctorum
sententias parum attentus, oscitans sæpe, et alias res agens, fidem
apud eruditos decoxit. Huet de claris interpretibus, apud Blount.
Daunou, however, in the Biographie Universelle, art. Thucydides,
asserts that Valla’s translation of that historian is generally
faithful. This would show no inconsiderable knowledge of Greek for
that age.

SECT. II. 1450-1460.

_Greeks in Italy--Invention of Printing._

|Fresh arrival of Greeks in Italy.|

12. The capture of Constantinople in 1453 drove a few learned Greeks, who had lingered to the last amidst the crash of their ruined empire, to the hospitable and admiring Italy. Among these have been reckoned Argyropulus and Chalcondyles, successively teachers of their own language, Andronicus Callistus, who is said to have followed the same profession both there and at Rome, and Constantine Lascaris, of an imperial family, whose lessons were given for several years at Milan, and afterwards at Messina. It seems, however, to be proved that Argyropulus had been already for several years in Italy.[318]

[318] Hody. Tiraboschi. Roscoe.

|Platonists and Aristotelians.|

13. The cultivation of Greek literature gave rise about this time to a vehement controversy, which had some influence on philosophical opinions in Italy. Gemistus Pletho, a native of the Morea, and one of those who attended the council of Florence in 1439, being an enthusiastic votary of the Platonic theories in metaphysics and natural theology communicated to Cosmo de’ Medici part of his own zeal; and from that time the citizen of Florence formed a scheme of establishing an academy of learned men, to discuss and propagate the Platonic system. This seems to have been carried into effect early in the present decennial period.

|Their controversy.|

14. Meantime, a treatise by Pletho, wherein he not only extolled the Platonic philosophy, which he mingled, as was then usual, with that of the Alexandrian school, and of the spurious writings attributed to Zoroaster and Hermes, but inveighed without measure against Aristotle and his disciples, had aroused the Aristotelians of Greece, where, as in western Europe, their master’s authority had long prevailed. It seems not improbable that the Platonists were obnoxious to the orthodox party, for sacrificing their own church to that of Rome; and there is also strong ground for ascribing a rejection of Christianity to Pletho. The dispute, at least, began in Greece, where Pletho’s treatise met with an angry opponent in Gennadius, patriarch of Constantinople.[319] It soon spread to Italy; Theodore Gaza embracing the cause of Aristotle with temper and moderation,[320] and George of Trebizond, a far inferior man, with invectives against the Platonic philosophy and its founder. Others replied in the same tone; and whether from ignorance or from rudeness, this controversy appears to have been managed as much with abuse of the lives and characters of two philosophers, dead nearly two thousand years, as with any rational discussion of their tenets. Both sides, however, strove to make out, what in fact was the ultimate object, that the doctrine they maintained was more consonant to the Christian religion than that of their adversaries. Cardinal Bessarion, a man of solid and elegant learning, replied to George of Trebizond in a book entitled Adversus Calumniatorem Platonis; one of the first books that appeared from the Roman press, in 1470. This dispute may possibly have originated, at least in Greece, before 1450; and it was certainly continued beyond 1460, the writings both of George and Bessarion appearing to be rather of later date.[321]

[319] Pletho’s death, in an extreme old age, is fixed by Brucker, on
the authority of George of Trebizond, before the capture of
Constantinople. A letter, indeed, of Bessarion, in 1462 (Mém. de
l’Acad. des Inscript. vol. ii.), seems to imply that he was then
living; but this cannot have been the case. Gennadius, his enemy,
abdicated the patriarchate of Constantinople in 1458, having been
raised to it in 1453. The public burning of Pletho’s book was in
the intermediate time; and it is agreed that this was done after
his death.

[320] Hody, p. 79, doubts whether Gaza’s vindication of Aristotle were
not merely verbal, in conversation with Bessarion; which is however
implicitly contradicted by Boivin and Tiraboschi, who assert him to
have written against Pletho. The comparison of Plato and Aristotle
by George of Trebizond was published at Venice in 1523, as Heeren
says, on the authority of Fabricius.

[321] The best account, and that from which later writers have freely
borrowed, of this philosophical controversy, is by Boivin, in the
second volume of the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions, p. 15.
Brucker, iv. 40, Buhle, ii. 107, and Tiraboschi, vi. 303, are my
other authorities.

15. Bessarion himself was so far from being as unjust towards Aristotle as his opponent was towards Plato, that he translated his metaphysics. That philosopher, though almost the idol of the schoolmen, lay still in some measure under the ban of the church, which had very gradually removed the prohibition she laid on his writings in the beginning of the thirteenth century. Nicholas V. first permitted them to be read without restriction in the universities.[322]

[322] Launoy, De Varia Aristotelis Fortuna in Academia Parisiensi,
p. 44.

|Marsilius Ficinus.|

16. Cosmo de’ Medici selected Marsilius Ficinus, as a youth of great promise, to be educated in the mysteries of Platonism, that he might become the chief and preceptor of the new academy; nor did the devotion of the young philosopher fall short of the patron’s hope. Ficinus declares himself to have profited as much by the conversation of Cosmo as by the writings of Plato; but this is said in a dedication to Lorenzo, and the author has not, on other occasions, escaped the reproach of flattery. He began as early as 1456, at the age of twenty-three, to write on the Platonic philosophy; but being as yet ignorant of Greek, prudently gave way to the advice of Cosmo and Landino, that he should acquire more knowledge before he imparted it to the world.[323]

[323] Brucker, iv. 50. Roscoe.

|Invention of printing.|

17. The great glory of this decennial period is the invention of printing, or at least, as all must allow, its application to the purposes of useful learning. The reader will not expect a minute discussion of so long and unsettled a controversy as that which the origin of this art has furnished. For those who are little conversant with the subject, a very few particulars may be thought necessary.

|Block-books.|

18. About the end of the fourteenth century we find a practice of taking impressions from engraved blocks of wood, sometimes for playing cards, which came into use not long before that time; sometimes for rude cuts of saints.[324] The latter were frequently accompanied by a few lines of letters cut in the block. Gradually entire pages were impressed in this manner; and thus began what are called block books, printed in fixed characters, but never exceeding a very few leaves. Of these there exist nine or ten, often reprinted, as it is generally thought, between 1400 and 1440.[325] In using the word printed, it is of course not intended to prejudice the question as to the real art of printing. These block books seem to have been all executed in the Low Countries. They are said to have been followed by several editions of the short grammar of Donatus in wooden stereotype.[326] These also were printed in Holland. This mode of printing from blocks of wood has been practised in China from time immemorial.

[324] Heinekke and others have proved that playing cards were known in
Germany as early as 1299; but these were probably painted.
Lambinet, Origines de l’Imprimerie. Singer’s History of Playing
Cards. The earliest cards were on parchment.

[325] Lambinet, Singer, Ottley, Dibdin, &c.

[326] Lambinet.

|Gutenberg and Costar’s claims.|

19. The invention of printing, in the modern sense, from moveable letters, has been referred by most to Gutenberg, a native of Mentz, but settled at Strasburg. He is supposed to have conceived the idea before 1440, and to have spent the next ten years in making attempts at carrying it into effect, which some assert him to have done in short fugitive pieces, actually printed from his moveable wooden characters before 1450. But of the existence of these there seems to be no evidence.[327] Gutenberg’s priority is disputed by those who deem Lawrence Costar, of Haarlem, the real inventor of the art. According to a tradition, which seems not to be traced beyond the middle of the sixteenth century, but resting afterwards upon sufficient testimony to prove its local reception, Costar substituted moveable for fixed letters as early as 1430; and some have believed that a book called Speculum Humanæ Salvationis, of very rude wooden characters, proceeded from the Haarlem press before any other that is generally recognised.[328] The tradition adds, that an unfaithful servant having fled with the secret, set up for himself at Strasburg, or Mentz; and this treachery was originally ascribed to Gutenberg or Fust, but seems, since they have been manifestly cleared of it, to have been laid on one Gensfleisch, reputed to be the brother of Gutenberg.[329] The evidence, however, as to this, is highly precarious; and even if we were to admit the claims of Costar, there seems no fair reason to dispute that Gutenberg might also have struck out an idea, that surely did not require any extraordinary ingenuity, and which left the most important difficulties to be surmounted, as they undeniably were, by himself and his coadjutors.[330]

[327] Mémoires de l’Acad. des Inscript. xvii. 762. Lambinet, p. 113.

[328] In Mr. Ottley’s History of Engraving, the claims of Costar are
strongly maintained, though chiefly on the authority of Meerman’s
proofs, which go to establish the local tradition. But the evidence
of Ludovico Guicciardini is an answer to those who treat it as a
forgery of Hadrian Junius. Santander, Lambinet, and most recent
investigators are for Mentz against Haarlem.

[329] Gensfleisch seems to have been the name of that branch of the
Gutenberg family to which the inventor of printing belonged. Biogr.
Univ., art. Gutenberg.

[330] Lambinet, p. 315.

|Progress of the invention.|

20. It is agreed by all, that about 1450, Gutenberg, having gone to Mentz, entered into partnership with Fust, a rich merchant of that city, for the purpose of carrying the invention into effect, and that Fust supplied him with considerable sums of money. The subsequent steps are obscure. According to a passage in the Annales Hirsargienses of Trithemius, written sixty years afterwards, but on the authority of a grandson of Peter Schæffer, their assistant in the work, it was about 1452 that the latter brought the art to perfection, by devising an easier mode of casting types.[331] This passage has been interpreted, according to a lax construction, to mean, that Schæffer invented the method of casting types in a matrix; but seems more strictly to mean, that we owe to him the great improvement in letter-casting, namely, the punches of engraved steel, by which the matrices or moulds are struck, and without which, independent of the economy of labour, there could be no perfect uniformity of shape. Upon the former supposition, Schæffer may be reckoned the main inventor of the art of printing; for moveable wooden letters, though small books may possibly have been printed by means of them, are so inconvenient, and letters of cut metal so expensive, that few great works were likely to have passed through the press, till cast types were employed. Van Praet, however, believes the psalter of 1457 to have been printed from wooden characters; and some have conceived letters of cut metal to have been employed both in that and in the first Bible. Lambinet, who thinks “the essence of the art of printing is in the engraved punch,” naturally gives the chief credit to Schæffer;[332] but this is not the more usual opinion.

[331] Petrus Opilio de Gernsheim, tunc famulus inventoris primi Joannis
Fust, homo ingeniosus et prudens, faciliorem modum fundendi
characteras excogitavit, et artem, ut nunc est, complevit.
Lambinet, i. 101. See Daunou contra. Id. 417.

[332] ii. 213. In another place, he divides the praise better: Gloire
donc à Gutenberg, qui, le premier, conçut l’idée de la typographie,
en imaginant la mobilité des caractères, qui en est l’âme; gloire à
Fust, qui en fît usage avec lui, et sans lequel nous ne jouirions
peut-être pas de ce bienfait; gloire à Schæffer, à qui nous devons
tout le mécanisme, et toutes les merveilles de l’art. i. 119.

|First printed Bible.|

21. The earliest book, properly so called, is now generally believed to be the Latin Bible, commonly called the Mazarin Bible, a copy having been found, about the middle of the last century, in Cardinal Mazarin’s library at Paris.[333] It is remarkable, that its existence was unknown before; for it can hardly be called a book of very extraordinary scarcity, nearly twenty copies being in different libraries, half of them in those of private persons in England.[334] No date appears in this Bible, and some have referred its publication to 1452, or even to 1450, which few perhaps would at present maintain; while others have thought the year 1455 rather more probable.[335] In a copy belonging to the royal library at Paris, an entry is made, importing that it was completed in binding and illuminating at Mentz, on the feast of the Assumption (Aug. 15), 1456. But Trithemius, in the passage above quoted, seems to intimate that no book had been printed in 1452; and, considering the lapse of time that would naturally be employed in such an undertaking during the infancy of the art, and that we have no other printed book of the least importance to fill up the interval till 1457, and also that the binding and illuminating the above-mentioned copy is likely to have followed the publication at no great length of time, we may not err in placing its appearance in the year 1455, which will secure its hitherto unimpeached priority in the records of bibliography.[336]

[333] The Cologne chronicle says: Anno Domini 1450, qui jubilæus erat,
cœptum est imprimi, primusque liber, qui excudebatur, biblia fuere
Latina.

[334] Bibliotheca Sussexiana, i. 293. (1827.) The number there
enumerated is eighteen; nine in public, and nine in private
libraries; three of the former, and all the latter, English.

[335] Lambinet thinks it was probably not begun before 1453, nor
published till the end of 1455. i. 130. See, on this Bible, an
article by Dr. Dibdin, in Valpy’s Classical Journal, No. 8; which
collects the testimonies of his predecessors.

[336] It is very difficult to pronounce on the means employed in the
earliest books, which are almost all controverted. This bible is
thought by Fournier, himself a letter founder, to be printed from
wooden types; by Meerman, from types cut in metal; by Heinekke and
Daunou from cast types, which is most probable. Lambinet, i. 417.
Daunou does not believe that any book was printed with types cut
either in wood or metal; and that, after block books, there were
none but with cast letters like those now in use, invented by
Gutenberg, perfected by Schæffer, and first employed by them and
Fust in the Mazarin Bible. Id. p. 423.

|Beauty of the book.|

22. It is a very striking circumstance, that the high-minded inventors of this great art tried at the very outset so bold a flight as the printing an entire Bible, and executed it with astonishing success. It was Minerva leaping on earth in her divine strength and radiant armour, ready at the moment of her nativity to subdue and destroy her enemies. The Mazarin Bible is printed, some copies on vellum, some on paper of choice quality, with strong, black, and tolerably handsome characters, but with some want of uniformity, which has led, perhaps unreasonably, to a doubt whether they were cast in a matrix. We may see in imagination this venerable and splendid volume leading up the crowded myriads of its followers, and imploring, as it were, a blessing on the new art, by dedicating its first fruits to the service of Heaven.

|Early printed sheets.|

23. A metrical exhortation, in the German language, to take arms against the Turks, dated in 1454, has been retrieved in the present century. If this date unequivocally refers to the time of printing, which does not seem a necessary consequence, it is the earliest loose sheet that is known to be extant. It is said to be in the type of what is called the Bamberg Bible, which we shall soon have to mention. Two editions of Letters of Indulgence from Nicolas V., bearing the date of 1454, are extant in single printed sheets, and two more editions of 1455;[337] but it has justly been observed, that, even if published before the Mazarin Bible, the printing of that great volume must have commenced long before. An almanac for the year 1457 has also been detected; and as fugitive sheets of this kind are seldom preserved, we may justly conclude that the art of printing was not dormant, so far as these light productions are concerned. A Donatus, with Schæffer’s name, but no date, may or may not be older than a psalter published in 1457 by Fust and Schæffer (the partnership with Gutenberg having been dissolved in November, 1455, and having led to a dispute and litigation), with a colophon, or notice, subjoined in the last page, in these words:

Psalmorum codex venustate capitalium decoratus, rubricationibusque sufficienter distinctus, adinventione artificiosa imprimendi ac caracterizandi, absque calami ulla exaratione sic effigiatus, et ad eusebiam Dei industrie est summatus. Per Johannem Fust, civem Moguntinum, et Petrum Schæffer de Gernsheim, anno Domini millesimo cccclvii. In vigilia Assumptionis.[338]

A colophon, substantially similar, is subjoined to several of the Fustine editions. And this seems hard to reconcile with the story that Fust sold his impressions at Paris, as late as 1463, for manuscripts.

[337] Brunet, Supplément au Manuel du Libraire. It was not known till
lately that more than one edition out of these four was in
existence, Santander thinks their publication was after 1460. Dict.
Bibliographique du 15me Siècle, i. 92. But this seems improbable,
from the transitory character of the subject. He argues from a
resemblance in the letters to those used by Fust and Schæffer in
the Durandi Rationale of 1459.

[338] Dibdin’s Bibliotheca Spenceriana. Biogr. Univ., Gutenberg, &c.
In the Donatus above mentioned, the method of printing is also
mentioned: Explicit Donatus arte nova imprimendi seu caracterizandi
per Petrum de Gernsheim in urbe Moguntina effigiatus. Lambinet
considers this and the Bible to be the first specimens of
typography, for he doubts the Literæ Indulgentiarum, though
probably with no cause.

|Psalter of 1459. Other early books.|

24. Another psalter was printed by Fust and Schæffer with similar characters in 1459; and in the same year, Durandi Rationale, a treatise on the liturgical offices of the church; of which Van Praet says, that it is perhaps the earliest with cast types to which Fust and Schæffer have given their name and a date.[339] The two psalters he conceives to have been printed from wood. But this would be disputed by other eminent judges.[340] In 1460, a work of considerable size, the Catholicon of Balbi, came out from an opposition press, established at Mentz by Gutenberg. The Clementine Constitutions, part of the canon law, were also printed by him in the same year.

[339] Lambinet, i. 154.

[340] Lambinet, Dibdin. The former thinks the inequality of letters
observed in the psalter of 1457 may proceed from their being cast
in a matrix of plaster or clay, instead of metal.

|Bible of Pfister.|

25. These are the only monuments of early typography acknowledged to come within the present decennium. A Bible without a date, supposed by some to have been printed by Pfister at Bamberg, though ascribed by others to Gutenberg himself, is reckoned by good judges certainly prior to 1462, and perhaps as early as 1460. Daunou and others refer it to 1461. The antiquities of typography, after all the pains bestowed upon them, are not unlikely to receive still further elucidation in the course of time.

|Greek first taught at Paris.|

26. On the 19th of January, 1458, as Crevier, with a minuteness becoming the subject, informs us, the university of Paris received a petition from Gregory, a native of Tiferno, in the kingdom of Naples, to be appointed teacher of Greek. His request was granted, and a salary of one hundred crowns assigned to him, on condition that he should teach gratuitously, and deliver two lectures every day, one on the Greek language, and the other on the art of rhetoric.[341] From this auspicious circumstance Crevier deduces the restoration of ancient literature in the university of Paris, and consequently in the kingdom of France. For above two hundred years, the scholastic logic and philosophy had crushed polite letters. No mention is made of rhetoric, that is, of the art that instructs in the ornaments of style, in any statute or record of the university since the beginning of the thirteenth century. If the Greek language, as Crevier supposes, had not been wholly neglected, it was, at least, so little studied, that entire neglect would have been practically the same.

[341] Crevier, Hist. de l’Univ. de Paris, iv. 243.

|Leave unwillingly granted.|

27. This concession was, perhaps, unwillingly made, and, as frequently happens in established institutions, it left the prejudices of the ruling party rather stronger than before. The teachers of Greek and rhetoric were specially excluded from the privileges of regency by the faculty of arts. These branches of knowledge were looked upon as unessential appendages to a good education, very much as the modern languages are treated in our English schools and universities at this day. A bigoted adherence to old systems, and a lurking reluctance that the rising youth should become superior in knowledge to ourselves, were no peculiar evil spirits that haunted the university of Paris, though none ever stood more in need of a thorough exorcism. For many years after this time, the Greek and Latin languages were thus taught by permission, and with very indifferent success.

|Purbach; his mathematical discoveries.|

28. Purbach, or Peurbach, native of a small Austrian town of that name, has been called the first restorer of mathematical science in Europe. Ignorant of Greek, and possessing only a bad translation of Ptolemy, lately made by George of Trebizond,[342] he yet was able to explain the rules of physical astronomy and the theory of the planetary motions far better than his predecessors. But his chief merit was in the construction of trigonometrical tables. The Greeks had introduced the sexagesimal division, not only of the circle, but of the radius, and calculated chords according to this scale. The Arabians, who, about the ninth century, first substituted the sine, or half chord of the double arch, in their tables, preserved the same graduation. Purbach made one step towards a decimal scale, which the new notation by Arabic numerals rendered highly convenient, by dividing the radius, or sinus totus, as it was then often called, into 600,000 parts, and gave rules for computing the sines of arcs; which he himself also calculated, for every minute of the quadrant, as Delambre and Kästner think, or for every ten minutes, according to Gassendi and Hutton, in parts of this radius. The tables of Albaten the Arabian geometer, the inventor, as far as appears, of sines, had extended only to quarters of a degree.[343]

[342] Montucla, Biogr. Univ. It is however certain, and is admitted by
Delambre, the author of this article in the Biog. Univ., that
Purbach made considerable progress in abridging and explaining the
text of this translation, which, if ignorant of the original, he
must have done by his mathematical knowledge. Kästner, ii. 521.

[343] Montucla, Hist. des Mathématiques, i. 539. Hutton’s Mathematical
Dictionary, and his Introduction to Logarithms. Gassendi, Vita
Purbachii. Biogr. Univ. Peurbach (by Delambre). Kästner, Geschichte
der Mathematik, i. 529-543, 572; ii. 319. Gassendi twice gives
6,000,000 for the parts of Purbach’s radius. None of these writers
seem comparable in accuracy to Kästner.

|Other mathematicians.|

29. Purbach died young, in 1461, when, by the advice of Cardinal Bessarion, he was on the point of setting out for Italy, in order to learn Greek. His mantle descended on Regiomontanus, a disciple, who went beyond his master, though he has sometimes borne away his due credit. A mathematician rather earlier than Purbach, was Nicolas Cusanus, raised to the dignity of cardinal in 1448. He was by birth a German, and obtained a considerable reputation for several kinds of knowledge.[344] But he was chiefly distinguished for the tenet of the earth’s motion, which, however, according to Montucla, he proposed only as an ingenious hypothesis. Fioravanti, of Bologna, is said, on contemporary authority, to have removed, in 1455, a tower with its foundation, to a distance of several feet, and to have restored to the perpendicular one at Cento seventy-five feet high, which had swerved five feet.[345]

[344] A work upon statics, or rather upon the weight of bodies in
water, by Cusanus, seems chiefly remarkable, as it shows both a
disposition to ascertain physical truths by experiment, and an
extraordinary misapprehension of the results. See Kästner, ii. 122.
It is published in an edition of Vitruvius, Strasburg, 1550.

[345] Tiraboschi. Montucla. Biogr. Univ.

SECT. III. 1460-1470.

_Progress of Art of Printing--Learning in Italy and rest of Europe._

|Progress of printing in Germany.|

30. The progress of that most important invention, which illustrated the preceding ten years, is the chief subject of our consideration in the present. Many books, it is to be observed, even of the superior class, were printed, especially in the first thirty years after the invention of the art, without date of time or place; and this was, of course, more frequently the case with smaller or fugitive pieces. A catalogue, therefore, of books that can be certainly referred to any particular period must always be very defective. A collection of fables in German was printed at Bamberg in 1461, and another book in 1462, by Pfister, at the same place.[346] The Bible which bears his name has been already mentioned. In 1462 Fust published a Bible, commonly called the Mentz Bible, and which passed for the earliest till that in the Mazarin library came to light. But in the same year, the city having been taken by Adolphus count of Nassau, the press of Fust was broken up, and his workmen, whom he had bound by an oath to secrecy, dispersed themselves into different quarters. Released thus, as they seem to have thought, from their obligation, they exercised their skill in other places. It is certain, that the art of printing, soon after this, spread into the towns near the Rhine; not only Bamberg, as before mentioned, but Cologne, Strasburg, Augsburg, and one or two more places, sent forth books before the conclusion of these ten years. Nor was Mentz altogether idle, after the confusion occasioned by political events had abated. Yet the whole number of books printed with dates of time and place, in the German empire, from 1461 to 1470, according to Panzer, was only twenty-four; of which five were Latin, and two German, Bibles. The only known classical works are two editions of Cicero de Officiis, at Mentz, in 1465 and 1466, and another about the latter year at Cologne, by Ulric Zell; perhaps also the treatise de Finibus, and that de Senectute, at the same place. There is also reason to suspect that a Virgil, a Valerius Maximus, and a Terence, printed by Mentelin at Strasburg, without a date, are as old as 1470; and the same has been thought of one or two editions of Ovid de Arte Amandi, by Zell of Cologne. One book, Joannis de Turrecremata Explanatio in Psalterium, was printed by Zainer, at Cracow, in 1465. This is remarkable, as we have no evidence of the Polish press from that time till 1500. Several copies of this book are said to exist in Poland; yet doubts of its authenticity have been entertained. Zainer settled soon afterwards at Augsburg.[347]

[346] Lambinet.

[347] Panzer, Annales Typographici. Biographie Universelle, Zainer.

|Introduced into France.|

31. It was in 1469 that Ulric Gering, with two more, who had been employed as pressmen by Fust at Mentz, were induced by Fitchet and Lapierre, rectors of the Sorbonne, to come to Paris, where several books were printed in 1470 and 1471. The epistles of Gasparin of Barziza appear, by some verses subjoined, to have been the earliest among these.[348] Panzer has increased to eighteen the list of books printed before the close of 1472.[349]

[348] The last four of these lines are the following:

Primos ecce libros quos hæc industria finxit,
Francorum in terris, ædibus atque tuis.
Michael, Udalricus, Martinusque magistri
Hos impresserunt, et facient alios.

[349] See Greswell’s Early Parisian Press.

|Caxton’s first works.|

32. But there seem to be unquestionable proofs that a still earlier specimen of typography is due to an English printer, the famous Caxton. His Recueil des Histoires de Troye appears to have been printed during the life of Philip duke of Burgundy, and consequently before June 15, 1467. The place of publication, certainly within the duke’s dominions, has not been conjectured. It is, therefore, by several years the earliest printed book in the French language. A Latin speech by Russell, ambassador of Edward IV. to Charles of Burgundy, in 1469, is the next publication of Caxton. This was also printed in the Low Countries.[350]

[350] Dibdin’s Typographical Antiquities. This is not noticed in the
Biographie Universelle, nor in Brunet; an omission hardly excusable.

|Printing exercised in Italy.|

33. A more splendid scene was revealed in Italy. Sweynheim and Pannartz, two workmen of Fust, set up a press, doubtless with encouragement and patronage, at the monastery of Subiaco in the Apennines, a place chosen either on account of the numerous manuscripts it contained, or because the monks were of the German nation; and hence an edition of Lactantius issued in October, 1465, which one, no longer extant, of Donatus’s little grammar is said to have preceded. An edition of Cicero de Officiis, without a date, is referred by some to the year 1466. In 1467, after printing Augustin de Civitate Dei, and Cicero de Oratore, the two Germans left Subiaco for Rome, where they sent forth not less than twenty-three editions of ancient Latin authors before the close of 1470. Another German, John of Spire, established a press at Venice, in 1469, beginning with Cicero’s Epistles. In that and the next year, almost as many classical works were printed at Venice as at Rome, either by John and his brother Vindelin, or by a Frenchman, Nicolas Jenson. Instances are said to exist of books printed by unknown persons at Milan, in 1469; and in 1470, Zarot, a German, opened there a fertile source of typography, though but two Latin authors were published that year. An edition of Cicero’s Epistles appeared also in the little town of Foligno. The whole number of books that had issued from the press in Italy at the close of that year amounts, according to Panzer, to eighty-two; exclusive of those which have no date, some of which may be referrible to this period.

|Lorenzo de’ Medici.|

34. Cosmo de’ Medici died in 1464. But the happy impulse he had given to the restoration of letters was not suspended; and in the last year of the present decade, his wealth and his influence over the republic of Florence had devolved on a still more conspicuous character, his grandson Lorenzo, himself worthy, by his literary merits, to have done honour to any patron, had not a more prosperous fortune called him to become one.

|Italian poetry of fifteenth century.|

35. The epoch of Lorenzo’s accession to power is distinguished by a circumstance hardly less honourable than the restoration of classical learning,--the revival of native genius in poetry, after the slumber of near a hundred years. After the death of Petrarch, many wrote verses, but none excelled in the art; though Muratori has praised the poetry down to 1400, especially that of Guisto di Conti, whom he does not hesitate to place among the first poets of Italy.[351] But that of the fifteenth century is abandoned by all critics as rude, feeble, and ill expressed. The historians of literature scarcely deign to mention a few names, or the editors of selections to extract a few sonnets. The romances of chivalry in rhyme, Buovo d’Antona, la Spagna, l’Ancroja, are only deserving to be remembered as they led in some measure to the great poems of Boiardo and Ariosto. In themselves they are mean and prosaic. It is vain to seek a general cause for the sterility in the cultivation of Latin and Greek literature, which we know did not obstruct the brilliancy of Italian poetry in the next age. There is only one cause for the want of great men in any period;--nature does not think fit to produce them. They are no creatures of education and circumstance.

[351] Muratori della Perfetta Poesia, p. 193. Bouterwek, Gesch. der
Ital. Poesie. i. 216.

|Italian prose of same age.|

36. The Italian prose literature of this interval from the age of Petrarch would be comprised in a few volumes. Some historical memoirs may be found in Muratori, but far the chief part of his collection is in Latin. Leonard Aretin wrote lives of Dante and Petrarch in Italian, which, according to Corniani, are neither valuable for their information nor for their style. The Vita Civile of Palmieri seems to have been written some time after the middle of the fifteenth century; but of this Corniani says, that having wished to give a specimen, on account of the rarity of Italian in that age, he had abandoned his intention, finding that it was hardly possible to read two sentences in the Vita Civile without meeting some barbarism or incorrectness. The novelists Sacchetti, and Ser Giovanni, author of the Pecorone, who belong to the end of the fourteenth century, are read by some; their style is familiar and idiomatic; but Crescimbeni praises that of the former. Corniani bestows some praise on Passavanti and Pandolfini; the first a religious writer, not much later than Boccaccio; the latter a noble Florentine, author of a moral dialogue in the beginning of the fifteenth century. Filelfo, among his voluminous productions, has an Italian commentary on Petrarch, of which Corniani speaks very slightingly. The commentary of Landino on Dante is much better esteemed; but it was not published till 1481.

|Giostra of Politian.|

37. It was on occasion of a tournament, wherein Lorenzo himself and his brother Julian had appeared in the lists, that poems were composed by Luigi Pulci, and by Politian, then a youth, or rather a boy, the latter of which displayed more harmony, spirit, and imagination, than any that had been written since the death of Petrarch.[352] It might thus be seen, that there was no real incompatibility between the pursuits of ancient literature and the popular language of fancy and sentiment; and that, if one gave chastity and elegance of style, a more lively and natural expression of the mind could best be attained by the other.

[352] Extracts from this poem will be found in Roscoe’s Lorenzo, and
in Sismondi, Littérature du Midi, ii. 43, who praises it highly, as
the Italian critics have done, and as by the passages quoted it
seems well to deserve. Roscoe supposes Politian to be only fourteen
years old when he wrote the Giostra di Giuliano. But the lines he
quotes allude to Lorenzo as chief of the republic, which could not
be said before the death of Pietro in December, 1469. If he wrote
them at sixteen, it is extraordinary enough; but these two years
make an immense difference. Ginguéné is of opinion, that they do
not allude to the tournament of 1468, but to one in 1473.

|Paul II. persecutes the learned.|

38. This period was not equally fortunate for the learned in other parts of Italy. Ferdinand of Naples, who came to the throne in 1458, proved no adequate representative of his father Alfonso. But at Rome they encountered a serious calamity. A few zealous scholars, such as Pomponius Lætus, Platina, Callimachus Experiens, formed an academy in order to converse together on subjects of learning, and communicate to each other the results of their private studies. Dictionaries, indexes, and all works of compilation being very deficient, this was the best substitute for the labour of perusing the whole body of Latin antiquity. They took Roman names; an innocent folly, long after practised in Europe. The pope, however, Paul II., thought fit, in 1468, to arrest all this society on charges of conspiracy against his life, for which there was certainly no foundation, and of setting up Pagan superstitions against Christianity, of which, in this instance, there seems to have been no proof. They were put to the torture, and kept in prison a twelvemonth, when the tyrant, who is said to have vowed this in his first rage, set them all at liberty; but it was long before the Roman academy recovered any degree of vigour.[353]

[353] Tiraboschi, vi. 93. Ginguéné. Brucker. Corniani ii. 280. This
writer, inferior to none in his acquaintance with the literature of
the fifteenth century, but, though not an ecclesiastic, always
favourable to the court of Rome, seems to strive to lay the blame
on the imprudence of Platina.

|Mathias Corvinus.|

|His library.|

39. We do not discover as yet much substantial encouragement to literature in any country on this side the Alps, with the exception of one where it was least to be anticipated. Mathias Corvinus, king of Hungary, from his accession in 1458 to his death in 1490, endeavoured to collect round himself the learned of Italy, and to strike light into the midst of the depths of darkness that encompassed his country. He determined, therefore, to erect an university, which, by the original plan, was to have been in a distinct city; but the Turkish wars compelled him to fix it at Buda. He availed himself of the dispersion of libraries, after the capture of Constantinople, to purchase Greek manuscripts, and employed four transcribers at Florence, besides thirty at Buda, to enrich his collection. Thus, at his death, it is said that the royal library at Buda contained 50,000 volumes; a number that appears wholly incredible.[354] Three hundred ancient statues are reported to have been placed in the same repository. But when the city fell into the hands of the Turks in 1527, these noble treasures were dispersed, and in great measure destroyed. Though the number of books, as is just observed, must have been exaggerated, it is possible that neither the burning of the Alexandrian library by Omar, if it ever occurred, nor any other single calamity recorded in history, except the two captures of Constantinople itself, has been more fatally injurious to literature; and, with due regard to the good intentions of Mathias Corvinus, it is deeply to be regretted that the inestimable relics once rescued from the barbarian Ottomans, should have been accumulated in a situation of so little security against their devastating arms.[355]

[354] The library collected by Nicolas V. contained only 5,000
manuscripts. The volumes printed in Europe before the death of
Corvinus would probably be reckoned highly at 15,000. Heeren
suspects the number 50,000 to be hyperbolical; and in fact there
can be no doubt of it.

[355] Brucker. Roscoe. Gibbon. Heeren, p. 173, who refers to several
modern books expressly relating to the fate of this library. Part
of it, however, found its way to that of Vienna.

|Slight signs of literature in England.|