se, progress, perfection, and decline of art and science, are
curious objects of contemplation, and intimately connected with a
narration of civil transactions. The events of no particular period can
be fully accounted for, but by considering the degrees of advancement
which men have reached in those particulars.

Those who cast their eye on the general revolutions of society, will
find that, as almost all improvements of the human mind had reached
nearly to their state of perfection about the age of Augustus, there
was a sensible decline from that point or period; and men thenceforth
relapsed gradually into ignorance and barbarism. The unlimited extent
of the Roman empire, and the consequent despotism of its monarchs,
extinguished all emulation, debased the generous spirits of men,
and depressed that noble flame by which all the refined arts must be
cherished and enlivened. The military government, which soon succeeded,
rendered even the lives and properties of men insecure and precarious;
and proved destructive to those vulgar and more necessary arts of
agriculture, manufactures, and commerce; and, in the end, to the
military art and genius itself, by which alone the immense fabric of the
empire could be supported. The irruption of the barbarous nations which
soon followed, overwhelmed all human knowledge, which was already far
in its decline; and men sunk every age deeper into ignorance, stupidity,
and superstition; till the light of ancient science and history had very
nearly suffered a total extinction in all the European nations.

But there is a point of depression, as well as of exaltation, from which
human affairs naturally return in a contrary direction, and beyond which
they seldom pass either in their advancement or decline. The period in
which the people of Christendom were the lowest sunk in ignorance, and
consequently in disorders of every kind, may justly be fixed at the
eleventh century, about the age of William the Conqueror; and from that
era the sun of science, beginning to reascend, threw out many gleams of
light, which preceded the full morning when letters were revived in the
fifteenth century. The Danes and other northern people, who had so long
infested all the coasts, and even the island parts of Europe, by their
depredations, having now learned the arts of tillage and agriculture,
found a certain subsistence at home, and were no longer tempted to
desert their industry, in order to seek a precar