I THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MIDDLE AGES. CANNOT occupy a single moment in apologetic observa tions; and if I could, I have no taste or desire to indulge in fulsome or encomiastic remarks. My apology and praise shall be condensed in the compass of a single sentence: I will do the best I can for the subject on which I am now to speak; and I will do that for one of the best classes of persons I know -the men- -the young men-- -the Christian young men of our times, whose hearts will impel, and whose conduct will mould the character of distant epochs and remote empires; since from this and similar points of influence, the future nations of Australasia shall receive the impress of their being, their vice or their virtue, their degradation or their grandeur, and become the home of anarchy and woe, or the scene of liberty, order, and happiness, when Europe shall have sunk into the prostration of age, or into the grave of her own luxury. The topic of the present sketch (and it is nothing but a sketch that I can present) ranges over ten centuries of life and action; over the period when the Western Empire, consolidated by martial valour and embellished by art, crumbled under the pressing vices of the Cæsars, and fell, as all licentious kingdoms must fall, before new and vigorous rivalship; and stretches onwards and onwards, through innumerable dioramic changes, and ceaseless conflicts, until the Eastern, the Greek Empire, that rose on the ruins of the Roman, in the cyclical history of VOL. IV. powers and principalities, shared the doom of its predecessors. The termini of the middle or dark ages, as they are called, may be comprehended in the reign of Constantine, and the success of Mohammedanism at Constantinople, when the crescent gleamed in triumph over the cross. But wide as is that circuit of time over which we are now to sweep, the subject is still more embarrassing from the strongly contrasted and opposite lights and shades in which it is brought before us in different historical schools. By one class, and popularly, the words "middle" and "dark" ages are convertible terms, and the period is regarded as one of dreary, unrelieved gloom, which, if momentarily broken, became only the denser from the evanescent coruscation. With another class all glows with sunny warmth, with the freshness of simplicity, with the splendour of romance. It must indeed be confessed that these ages present much of the picturesque in sentimentalism, of the noble in enterprise, and of the earnest in selfdevotion. Now we enter the hall in which sits, in barbaric magnificence, the baronial lord, surrounded with armed knights, and retainers, and serfs, and having the intellectual dulness broken by the song of the troubadour, or the quips and oddities of the slave-born fool. From the towers of that castle we gaze upon yonder lowly plain, crowded with forms of beauty and chivalry; the stern Saxon, the more poetic Norman, the gallant knight, the licentious but daring Templar; men whose lives had been a drama-who, in the plains of Esdraelon, or on the banks of Jordan, had shivered a lance with the Saracen; while, as if unworthy to approach such beings, and yet entering with intense interest—as all barbarism, whether of a higher or lower class, does-into the achievements of physical force and deeds of prowess, stand at a distance the vassals of feudal ism, the "hewers of wood and drawers of water." All is still, except human passion; all is quiet, except the ocean-like murmur of thousands of men, until over it is heard the fierce rush |
