think some that follow, for devotional feeling, and ease and sweetness of expression, are worthy of the place they occupy. It is, however, enough for one man to have written the hymn we have mentioned, which is destined to be sung by Christians while the English tongue is a medium or an agent of Christian song; yet, Dr. Palmer has contributed others, so instinct with evangel ical experience, and so pure in taste, that the Church will never let them die. A true hymn, meeting and satisfying a popular want, is a rare and precious gift to the world; many things must conspire-happy moments and a happy mind; in it meet the inspi rations of genius and of the Spirit of God. The best hymns have stolen upon the world in silence, coming not with observation, their authors least of all conscious of their merit; we believe this to have been true of Bishop Heber's Missionary Hymn, and also of the favorite hymn of Dr. Palmer. The other poems, contained in the volume, breathe the same purity of sentiment, and not a few of them possess great merit. While we think Dr. Palmer preëmi nently successful in his utterance of Christian experience "for the service of song" his other poems evince high appreciation of the beauty of nature, and embody the tenderest and best affections. His sonnet to the memory of his mother, although entirely different in conception, is not inferior in truthfulness to the well-known lines of Cowper. The stanzas, also, addressed to his wife are in the best vein of feeling, and evince not less a chastened imagination. We had intended to mention some other pieces we had marked, such as his lines on the Burial of Gen. James C. Rice, "Rest, warrior, rest;"-and those dedicated to Sergeant J. H. Thompson, entitled "The Christian Soldier's Sleep," in which patriotism and religion are happily blended;—his Farewell to Rome, a felicitous rendering of the scholar's feeling;-the song with which the volume closes, the only one in the book, a gem of its kind;-but we have already transcended our limits. The typographical appearance of the book is very handsome, and in admirable keeping with the taste and purity that breathe on every page. It will be seen that Randolph of New York is the publisher.

THE

NE W ENGLANDER.

No. XCII.

JULY, 1865.

ARTICLE I.-THE REVIVAL OF LETTERS IN THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES.

PART II. TO THE END OF CENTURY XV., AND BEYOND IT TO THE CLOSE OF THE PAPACY OF LEO X.

WE propose, in continuation of an essay already published in this Quarterly,* to sketch the revival of letters from the death of Pope Nicholas V., to the death of Pope Leo X. This period begins, as we have already remarked, with the influences proceeding from the fall of Constantinople and from the introduction of printing into Italy. It closes with the brief splendors of a culture brilliant and universal, in which learning, philosophy, Latin verse, were not the only factors, but Italian poetry, architecture, sculpture, painting, contributed as much, if not more, to the product. And this age of Leo X. is a proper close of our survey on several accounts. First, the wars of France and Spain in Italy, which ended with the peace of Cambray in 1529, must have done much to cripple the re

* Vol. XXIII., 1864, p. 661, and XXIV., 1865, p. 35. VOL. XXIV.

27

sources and to injure the welfare, and even the culture of Italy. Then the culture was so godless that it could not have failed to suffer a speedy decline, if external events had not interposed. Then, again, although the reaction against the Reformation did great good in Italy by sobering the minds of men, it threw suspicion on all manly thinking, on the study of Greck, and on philosophical speculation. Meanwhile learning found a better soil in northern Europe, and having divested itself of the characteristics which rendered the early Italian humanists so offensive, took its place, without pride or pretense, by the side of other sources of culture and advancement.

The historical events which affected Italy were local, and were determined by forces within the peninsula, until 1494. The profuse and kind Alfonso, King of Naples and Sicily, died in 1458. His illegitimate son, Ferdinand, who succeeded him in the first mentioned territory, was ere long compelled to encounter an insurrection of the Angevin party among the barons, who sought for assistance from the Pope and from John of Anjou, then lord of Genoa. But at length the Angevins and King René were entirely unsuccessful; the Genoese rebelled and defeated his army; Genoa itself soon fell under the sway of the duke of Milan; and the insurgents in Naples submitted, after successive defeats, to the King, whose reign of comparative peace lasted until his death in 1494.

At Rome the leading events until 1494 are the attempts of the popes from Calixtus III. onward to enrich and aggrandize their nephews or bastard children, and to put down the petty lords who held sway over a number of the towns in the ecclesiastical state. In the course of their selfish enterprises, several of them were stained with crimes at which heathen Rome in its worst days would have been shocked.

Florence, from the recall of Cosimo out of exile in 1434, until the death of his grandson Lorenzo, remained in tolerable peace. After the death of Cosimo, in 1464, the republic lost some of its importance, but it continued on the whole to hold the balance in the affairs of Italy. Towards Milan it sustained the relations of an ally, and towards Rome that of a jealous and suspicious neighbor. Within the republic it became evi

dent that a party with a family interest at its head was a state necessity, and thus the Medici, without the forms, by degrees assumed, through their faction, the reality of supreme power. The duchy of Milan, ably governed by the peasant's son and condottiere, Francis Sforza, was handed over by him, in 1466, to his son Galeazzo Maria. In his ducal reign of ten years, Galeazzo showed himself a monster of iniquity, and was assassinated by several outraged young nobles. His brother Ludovico Moro ruled in the name of Galeazzo's son, and finally secured the dukedom for himself.

Venice, after the successes of the Turks, still held important possessions across the sea and in Greece, and the island of Cyprus fell into its hands in 1473. Its plans in Italy, which were carefully watched by Florence and Milan, consisted in securing and attempting to enlarge its dominions on the mainland. Venice formed a loose aggregate of territories-Venice proper; the lands beyond the sea, which were governed on the plan of commercial monopoly and colonial oppression; and the lands on the terra firma, including Padua, Brescia, Verona, Bergamo, with their districts, which in submitting to Venice had preserved their municipal rights, and a feeling of separate independent existence.

In 1494, Italy began to be visited with troubles brought on her by the criminal ambition of the French kings. Charles VIII. of France, at the suggestion of Ludovico Moro, Duke of Milan, and urged on by Cardinal Julian della Rovere,-nephew of Sixtus IV, and afterwards Pope Julius II.,-asserted his claim to the throne of Naples, derived from the house of Anjon. His march was unopposed. He entered Florence, from which the weak Pietro de' Medici and his brothers were banished on account of neglecting to defend the borders. He passed in triumphal march through Rome, and took Naples without a blow, in 1495. The French, says the German historian Heinrich Leo, "were not without reason of the opinion that their Greek and Latin made the Italians so cowardly; for where the exertions of the intellect lead men to forget religion and national feeling, the foundations of morality, or cause them to be despised, they destroy national existence." But the

power of Charles VIII. in Italy slipped out of his hands as easily as he had taken possession.

It was just after the exile of the Medicis that Savonarola, prior of the Dominican convent of St. Mark, in Florence, endeavored to carry out his reforms in polity, morality, and religion. But he met with opposition from a party in the state of Florence, from Franciscans, and from Pope Alexander VI., and was publicly burnt May 23, 1497.

When Louis XII. succeeded his kinsman Charles VIII. on the throne of France, in 1498, a new claim, disastrous to the peace of Italy, was advanced, for he was descended from the Viscontis of Milan through his grandmother. He occupied Milan, and made a secret league with Ferdinand of Aragon to divide the kingdom of Naples between the two. The armies of occupation quarrel, and the Spanish general Gonzalo de Cordova easily strips the French of almost all their possessions in Naples.

It was about the same time that central Italy was disturbed by Cæsar Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI., who stopped at no falsehood or crime in endeavoring to secure power for himself and to destroy his enemies, especially the Orsini. But the death of the Pope, his father, in 1503, and the accession of his enemy, Pope Julius II., cut his projects short. Still the little pestilential lords of most of the towns in the ecclesiastical state were put down by these infamous Borgias, to the great advantage of public quiet, and it remained for the next Pope, the warlike Julius II., to extend the bounds of the Papal state.

The unprincipled league of Cambray in 1508 was entered into by France, the Emperor, and most of the powers of Italy, the Pope included, for the purpose of destroying Venice; but when the Pope had secured himself in the possession of the towns claimed as belonging to the ecclesiastical state, he made the holy league with Venice and Ferdinand of Aragon, in order to drive out the French from the duchy of Milan. This was nearly accomplished. In a battle at Ravenna in this war, Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, being with the Spanish army, was taken prisoner by the French; and the people of Florence, who had sided with the French, were compelled to alter