and hence the non-existence of
particular national literatures.

[Sidenote: Effect of modern languages.] Even after Rome had suffered her
great discomfiture on the scientific question respecting the motion of
the earth, the conquering party was not unwilling to veil its thoughts
in the Latin tongue, partly because it thereby insured a more numerous
class of intelligent readers, and partly because ecclesiastical
authority was now disposed to overlook what must otherwise be treated as
offensive, since to write in Latin was obviously a pledge of abstaining
from an appeal to the vulgar. The effect of the introduction of modern
languages was to diminish intercommunication among the learned.

[Sidenote: Approach of a crisis in Europe.] The movement of human
affairs, for so many years silent and imperceptible, was at length
coming to a crisis. An appeal to the emotions and moral sentiments at
the basis of the system, the history of which has occupied us so long,
had been fully made, and found ineffectual. It was now the time for a
like appeal to the understanding. Each age of life has its own logic.
The logic of the senses is in due season succeeded by that of the
intellect. Of faith there are two kinds, one of acquiescence, one of
conviction; and a time inevitably arrives when emotional faith is
supplanted by intellectual.

[Sidenote: Cosmo de' Medici. Florence.] As if to prove that the
impending crisis was not the offspring of human intentions, and not
occasioned by any one man, though that man might be the sovereign
pontiff, Nicolas V. found in his patronage of letters and art a rival
and friend in Cosmo de' Medici. An instructive incident shows how great
a change had taken place in the sentiments of the higher classes: Cosmo,
the richest of Italians, who had lavished his wealth on palaces,
churches, hospitals, libraries, was comforted on his death-bed, not, as
in former days would have been the case, by ministers of religion, but
by Marsilius Ficinus, the Platonist, who set before him the arguments
for a future life, and consoled his passing spirit with the examples and
precepts of Greek philosophy, teaching him thereby to exchange faith for
hope, forgetting that too often hopes are only the day-dreams of men,
not less unsubstantial and vain than their kindred of the night. Ficinus
had perhaps come to the conviction that philosophy is only a higher
stage of theology, the philosopher a very enlightened theologian.
[Siden