n of truth. The age had no remembrance of the past, no
power of understanding what other ages thought and felt. The Catholic
faith had degenerated into dogma and controversy. For more than
a thousand years not a single writer of first-rate, or even of
second-rate, reputation has a place in the innumerable rolls of Greek
literature.

If we seek to go deeper, we can still only describe the outward nature
of the clouds or darkness which were spread over the heavens during so
many ages without relief or light. We may say that this, like several
other long periods in the history of the human race, was destitute,
or deprived of the moral qualities which are the root of literary
excellence. It had no life or aspiration, no national or political
force, no desire for consistency, no love of knowledge for its own sake.
It did not attempt to pierce the mists which surrounded it. It did not
propose to itself to go forward and scale the heights of knowledge, but
to go backwards and seek at the beginning what can only be found towards
the end. It was lost in doubt and ignorance. It rested upon tradition
and authority. It had none of the higher play of fancy which creates
poetry; and where there is no true poetry, neither can there be any
good prose. It had no great characters, and therefore it had no great
writers. It was incapable of distinguishing between words and things. It
was so hopelessly below the ancient standard of classical Greek art and
literature that it had no power of understanding or of valuing them. It
is doubtful whether any Greek author was justly appreciated in antiquity
except by his own contemporaries; and this neglect of the great authors
of the past led to the disappearance of the larger part of them, while
the Greek fathers were mostly preserved. There is no reason to suppose
that, in the century before the taking of Constantinople, much more was
in existence than the scholars of the Renaissance carried away with them
to Italy.

The character of Greek literature sank lower as time went on. It
consisted more and more of compilations, of scholia, of extracts, of
commentaries, forgeries, imitations. The commentator or interpreter had
no conception of his author as a whole, and very little of the context
of any passage which he was explaining. The least things were preferred
by him to the greatest. The question of a reading, or a grammatical
form, or an accent, or the uses of a word, took the place of the aim or