lation of the _dark_
ages; an epithet which I do not extend to the twelfth and three
following. In tracing the decline of society from the subversion of the
Roman empire, we have been led, not without connexion, from ignorance to
superstition, from superstition to vice and lawlessness, and from thence
to general rudeness and poverty. I shall pursue an inverted order in
passing along the ascending scale, and class the various improvements
which took place between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries under three
principal heads, as they relate to the wealth, the manners, or the taste
and learning of Europe. Different arrangements might probably be
suggested, equally natural and convenient; but in the disposition of
topics that have not always an unbroken connexion with each other, no
method can be prescribed as absolutely more scientific than the rest.
That which I have adopted appears to me as philosophical and as little
liable to transitions as any other.

FOOTNOTES:

[479] The subject of the present chapter, so far as it relates to the
condition of literature in the middle ages, has been again treated by me
in the first and second chapters of a work, published in 1836, the
Introduction to the History of Literature in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth,
and Seventeenth Centuries. Some things will be found in it more exactly
stated, others newly supplied from recent sources.

[480] The authors of Histoire Litteraire de la France, t. i., can only
find three writers of Gaul, no inconsiderable part of the Roman Empire,
mentioned upon any authority; two of whom are now lost. In the preceding
century the number was considerably greater.

[481] Mosheim, Cent. 4. Tiraboschi endeavours to elevate higher the
learning of the early Christians, t. ii. p. 328. Jortin, however,
asserts that many of the bishops in the general councils of Ephesus and
Chalcedon could not write their names. Remarks on Ecclesiast. Hist. vol.
ii. p. 417.

[482] Gibbon roundly asserts that "the language of Virgil and Cicero,
though with some inevitable mixture of corruption, was so universally
adopted in Africa, Spain, Gaul, Great Britain, and Pannonia, that the
faint traces of the Punic or Celtic idioms were preserved only in the
mountains or among the peasants." Decline and Fall, vol. i. p. 60 (8vo.
edit.). For Britain he quotes Tacitus's Life of Agricola as his voucher.
But the only passage in this work that gives the least colour to
Gibbon's assertion is on