dst of jarrings and conflicts between those interests, that condition
was steadfastly maintained, as if through instinct, by them all. It
mattered not how antiquated were the forms insisted on, nor how far they
outraged common sense. New life was given to decaying illusions, and, in
return, strength was gathered from them. [Sidenote: and degradation by
African ideas.] Isis, with the moon beneath her feet, was planted, under
a new name, on the Bosphorus and the Tiber. African theology, African
ecclesiastical machinery, and African monasticism were made objects of
reverence to unsuspecting Europe. Juvenal says that the Roman painters
of his day lived on the goddess Isis. The Italian painters of a later
day lived on her modernized form.

[Sidenote: No literature in the Age of Faith.] In such a condition of
things the literary state could be no other than barren. Political
combinations had not only prescribed an intellectual terminus, but had
even laid down a rail upon which mental excursions were to be made, and
from which there was no departing; or, if a turn-out was permitted, it
was managed by a tonsured man. For centuries together, if we exclude
theological writings, there was absolutely no literature worth the name.
Life seems to have been spent in the pursuit of mere physical enjoyment,
and that enjoyment of a very low kind. When in the South of France and
Sicily literature began to dawn, it is not to be overlooked how much of
it was of an amatory kind; and love is the strongest of the passions.
The first aspect of Western literature was animal, not intellectual.
[Sidenote: Its critical innocence.] A taste for learning excited, there
reappeared in the schools the old treatises written a thousand years
before--the Elements of Euclid, the Geography of Ptolemy. Long after the
Reformation there was an intellectual imbecility which might well excite
our mirth, if it were not the index of a stage through which the human
mind must pass. Often enough we see it interestingly in the interweaving
of the new with the old ideas. If we take up a work on metallurgy, it
commences with Tubal Cain; if on music, with Jubal. The history of each
country is traced back to the sons of Noah, or at least to the fugitives
from the siege of Troy. An admiration for classical authors may perhaps
be excused. It exhibited itself amusingly in the eccentricity of
interlarding compositions of every kind with Greek and Latin quotations.
This was an age