Doubtless fascinating to watch the genius of a people burst forth under a burning or an icy sky, on virgin soil, or in historic land, yield to the impress of contemporary events, and put forth its first blossoms in those epic traditions or in those familiar songs, which still retain all the uncultured perfume of nature. But beneath that popular poetry wherein the great nations of Europe have shown all the variety of their respective characters, we perceive a literature which is learned but common to all alike, and a depository of the theological, philosophical, and political doctrines which moulded for eight hundred years the education of Christendom. Let us study that common education, and consider the modern nations, no longer in that isolation to which the special historian of England or of Italy condemns himself, but in the spirit of that fruitful intercourse marked out for them by Providence, tracing the history of literature up to the Middle Age, by reascending to that obscure moment which beheld letters escaping from the collapse of the old order, and thence following it through the schools of the barbarous epoch, till the new settlement of the nations, and its egress from those schools to take modern languages in possession. The dogma of human perfectibility finds little adhesion in a discouraged society, but may­hap that very discouragement is in fault. Though often useful to humble man, it is never prudent to drive him to despair. Souls must not, as Plato says, lose their wings, and, renouncing a perfection pronounced impossible, fling themselves into pleasures of easy achievement. For there are two doctrines of progress: the first, nourished in the schools of sensualism, rehabilitates the passions, and, promising the nations an earthly paradise at the end of a flowery path, gives them only a premature hell at the end of a way of blood; whilst the second, born from and inspired by Christianity, points to progress in the victory of the spirit over the flesh, promises nothing but as prize of warfare, and pronounces the creed which carries war into the individual soul to be the only way of peace for the nations. We must try and restore the doctrine of progress by Christianity as a comfort in these troubled days; we must justify it in refitting its own religious and philosophical principles, and cleansing it from errors which had placed it at the disposal of the most hateful aims; we must prove it by applying it to those ages which seem chosen to bely it, to an epoch of worse aspect, of misery unrivalled by our own—for we cannot join with those who accuse Providence itself in the blame they cast on the present time. Traversing rapidly the period between the fall of the Empire and the decline of the barbarian powers, where most historians have found only ruin, we shall see the renewal of the human mind, and sketch the history of light in an age of darkness, of progress in an era of decay...