" A promising son apostrophizes his father, "Base varlet! don't
you see how you have wronged me? If you had never been born and stood in
the way I should have come into all my grandfather's money."

The humour which has come to us from classic times, brings the life of
ancient Greece and Rome near to our own firesides. It is not that of a
primitive or decaying civilization, but of one advanced and matured,
resembling our own, in which density of population has brought a
clashing of interests, and enlarged knowledge has produced a variety of
thought upon a great multiplicity of home and foreign subjects. We can
thus bridge over two thousand years, and obtain, as it were, a grasp of
the Past, in which we find men so very like ourselves, not only in their
strong emotions, but in their little conceits and vanities, and their
opinions of each other.

ENGLISH HUMOUR.

CHAPTER I.

MIDDLE AGES.

Relapse of Civilization in the Middle Ages--Stagnation of Mind--Scarcity
of Books--Character of reviving Literature--Religious
Writings--Fantastic Legends--Influence of the Crusades--Romances--Sir
Bevis of Hamptoun--Prominence of the Lower Animals--Allegories.

Those ancient philosophers who believed in a mundane year and a
periodical repetition of the world's history, would have found a
remarkable corroboration of their theory in the retrogression of
learning during the middle ages, and its subsequent gradual revival.
This re-birth contained all the leading characteristics of the original
development of thought, although, amid the darkness, the torch handed
down from the past afforded occasionally some flickering light. The
great cause of the disappearance of literature and civilization was, of
course, the sword of the Goths, which made the rich countries of
Southern Europe, a wilderness and desolation. A lesser cause was the
intolerance of the ecclesiastics, who, in their detestation of Pagan
superstition and immorality endeavoured to destroy all classical
writings which touched upon mythological subjects, or contained unseemly
allusions. But, although we regret its action in this respect, and the
intellectual stagnation thus generally produced, we must admit that we
are indebted to the Church for the preservation of many valuable works.
There were many men of learning in the monasteries, and some of
sufficient enlightenment to be able to venerate the relics of Greek and
Latin literature. We find that in the