century, had constituted the sole labours of
the learned; and "variae lectiones" were long their pride and their
reward. Latin was the literary language of Europe. The vernacular idiom
in Italy was held in such contempt that their youths were not suffered
to read Italian books, their native productions. Varchi tells a curious
anecdote of his father sending him to prison, where he was kept on bread
and water, as a penance for his inveterate passion for reading Italian
books! Dante was reproached by the Italians for composing in his
mother-tongue, still expressed by the degrading designation of _il
volgare_, which the "resolute" John Florio renders "to make common;" and
to translate was contemptuously called _volgarizzare_. Petrarch rested
his fame on his Latin poetry, and called his Italian _nugellas
vulgares_! With us Roger Ascham was the first who boldly avowed "_To
speak as the common people_, to think as wise men;" yet, so late as the
time of Bacon, this great man did not consider his "Moral Essays" as
likely to last in the moveable sands of a modern language, for he has
anxiously had them sculptured in the marble of ancient Rome. Yet what
had the great ancients themselves done, but trusted to their own
_volgare_? The Greeks, the finest and most original writers of the
ancients, observes Adam Ferguson, "were unacquainted with every language
but their own; and if they became learned, it was only by studying what
they themselves had produced."

During fourteen centuries, whatever lay out of the pale of classical
learning was condemned as barbarism; in the meanwhile, however, amidst
this barbarism, another literature was insensibly creating itself in
Europe. Every people, in the gradual accessions of their vernacular
genius, discovered a new sort of knowledge, one which more deeply
interested their feelings and the times, reflecting the image, not of
the Greeks and the Latins, but of themselves! A spirit of inquiry,
originating in events which had never reached the ancient world, and the
same refined taste in the arts of composition caught from the models of
antiquity, at length raised up rivals, who competed with the great
ancients themselves; and modern literature now occupies a space which
appears as immensity, compared with the narrow and the imperfect limits
of the ancient. A complete collection of classical works, all the bees
of antiquity, may be hived in a glass-case; but those we should find
only the milk and