Then (sad relief!) from the bleak coast that hears THOMSON. In a short time swarms of the aforesaid nations [Saxons, Angles, and Jutes] came over into the island, and they began to increase so much that they became terrible to the natives themselves, who had invited them. THE VENERABLE BEDE. -- No written record tells us how Saxon or Engle dealt with the land he had made his own; how he drove out its older inhabitants, or how he shared it among the new; how the settlers settled down in township or thorpe, or how they moulded into shape, under changed conditions, the life they had brought with them from German shores. Even legend and tradition are silent as to their settlement. GREEN. J. R. What strikes us at once in the new England is, that it was the one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome. In other lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though they were equally conquered by German peoples, religion, social life, administrative order, still remained Roman. In Britain alone, Rome died into a vague tradition of the past. — J. R. GREEN. The Huns, who were spoken of in the last century, played an important part in the fifth century. Under Attila, they threatened the whole of Europe in 451, but were defeated at Châlons, by the combined force of the Romans, Goths, and Franks. They also invaded the Eastern Empire. After the death of Attila, in 453 or 454, the power of the Huns declined. Justice divine upon this side is goading DANTE, Inferno. Tr. Longfellow. As in polished societies ease and tranquillity are courted, they delight in war and dangers. He who falls in battle is reckoned happy. They who die of old age or of disease are deemed infamous. They boast, with the utmost exultation, of the number of enemies whom they have slain, and, as the most glorious of all ornaments, they fasten the scalps of those who have fallen by their hands to the trappings of their horses. — AмMIANUS MARCELLINUS. The Huns were not, like Goths and Vandals, a Teutonic or even a Slave people. They belonged to that terrible race whose original seats were in the vast central table-land of Asia; who under various names - Huns, Tartars, Mongols, Turks- have made it their boast to devastate for the sake of devastation, and from whom sprung the most renowned among the destroyers of men, Attila, Genghis, Timour, the Ottomans.-R. W. CHURCH. The victory which the Roman general, Aetius, with his Gothic allies, had then gained over the Huns, was the last victory of imperial Rome. But among the long Fasti of her triumphs, few can be found that, for their importance and ultimate benefit to mankind, are comparable with this expiring effort of her arms. - CREASY. The discomfiture [battle of Châlons] of the mighty attempt of Attila to found a new anti-Christian dynasty upon the wreck of the temporal power of Rome, at the end of the term of twelve hundred years, to which its duration had been limited by the forebodings of the heathen. — HERBERT. The battle of Châlons, where Hunland met Rome, and the Earth was played for, at sword-fence, by two earth-bestriding giants, the sweep of whose swords cut kingdoms in pieces, hovers dim in the languid remembrance of a few; while the poor police-court Treachery of a wretched Iscariot, transacted in the wretched land of Palestine, centuries earlier, for "thirty pieces of silver," lives clear in the heads, in the hearts, of all men. - CARLYLE. If a man were called to fix upon the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most calamitous and afflicted, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Theodosius the Great to the establishment of the Lombards in Italy. The contemporary authors, who beheld that scene of desolation, labor and are at a loss for expressions to describe the horror of it. The Scourge of God, the Destroyer of Nations, are the dreadful epithets by which they distinguish the most noted of the barbarous leaders; and they compare the ruin which they had brought on the world to the havoc occasioned by earthquakes, conflagrations, or deluges, the most formidable and fatal calamities which the imagination of man can conceive. - ROBERTSON. THE MIDDLE AGES. THE DARK AGES. Our clock strikes when there is a change from hour to hour; but no hammer in the Horologe of Time peals through the universe, when there is a change from Era to Era. CARLYLE. Many considerable portions of time, especially before the twelfth century, may justly be deemed so barren of events worthy of remembrance, that a single sentence or paragraph is often sufficient to give the character of entire generations, and of long dynasties of obscure kings. — HALLAM. It cost Europe a thousand years of barbarism to escape the fate of China. MACAULAY. THE period intervening between the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476) and the discovery of America by Columbus (1492), say from the fifth to the fifteenth century, is usually spoken of as the Middle Ages, or more concisely as the Middle Age. It is marked by many and great events, such as the institutions of feudalism and chivalry, the growth of municipalities, the crusades, the rise of the papal power, the invention of printing, the revival of learning, maritime discovery, etc., all which will be referred to in the proper places. The first five centuries of this period, say from the fall of Rome to the year 1000, are often known as the Dark Ages, because European society was then to appearance in a more benighted and semi-barbarous condition than either immediately before or since that time. The name Dark Ages is sometimes applied to nearly the whole period 500-1500. This is, indeed, the character of the Dark Age: it was a chaos of all the elements; the childhood of all the systems; a universal jumble; in which even strife itself was neither permanent nor systematic. GUIZOT. -- Writers innumerable have declaimed on the night of the Middle Ages, on the deluge of barbarism which, under the Goths, flooded the world, on the torpor of the human intellect, under the combined pressure of savage violence and priestly superstition; yet this was precisely the period when the minds of men, deprived of external vent, turned inwards on themselves; and that the learned and thoughtful, shut out from any active part in society by the general prevalence of military violence, sought, in the solitude of the cloister, employment in reflecting on the mind itself, and the general causes which, under its guidance, operated upon society. The influence of this great change, in the direction of thought, at once appeared when knowledge, liberated from the monastery and the university, again took its place ALISON. among the affairs of men. It is an exaggeration also to attribute to the Germanic invasions the retardation of intellectual development during the Middle Ages; for the decline was taking place for centuries before the invasions were of any engrossing importance. - COMTE. The three centuries under consideration, the Middle Ages, were, in point of fact, one of the most brutal, most ruffianly epochs in history, one of those wherein we encounter most crimes and violence, wherein the public peace was most incessantly troubled, and wherein the greatest licentiousness in morals prevailed. Nevertheless it cannot be denied that side by side with these gross and barbarous morals, this social disorder, there existed knightly morality and knightly poetry. We have moral records confronting ruffianly deeds; and the contrast is shocking, but real. It is exactly this contrast which makes the great and fundamental characteristic of the Middle Ages. - GUIZOT. The Dark Ages, as the period of Catholic ascendency is justly called, do undoubtedly display many features of great and genuine excellence. In active benevolence, in the spirit of reverence, in loyalty, in cooperative habits, they far transcend the noblest ages of pagan antiquity, while in that humanity which shrinks from the infliction of suffering, they were superior to Roman, and in their respect for chastity, to Greek civilization. On the other hand, they rank immeasurably below the best pagan civilizations in civic and patriotic virtues, in the love of liberty, in the number and splendor of the great characters they produced, in the dignity and beauty of the type of character they formed. They had their full share of tumult, anarchy, injustice, and war, and they should probably be placed, in all intellectual virtues, lower than any other period in the history of mankind. A boundless intolerance of all divergence of opinion was united with an equally boundless toleration of all falsehood and deliberate fraud that could favor received opinions. Credulity being taught as a virtue, and all conclusions dictated by authority, a deadly torpor sank upon the human mind, which for many centuries almost suspended its action, and was only broken by the scrutinizing, innovating, and free-thinking habits that accompanied the rise of the industrial republics in Italy. Few men who are not either priests or monks would not have preferred to live in the best days of the Athenian or of the Roman republics, in the age of Augustus or in the age of the Antonines, rather than in any period that elapsed between the triumph of Christianity and the fourteenth century. — LECKY. During the Middle Ages man had lived enveloped in a cowl. He had not seen the beauty of the world, or had seen it only to cross himself, and turn aside and tell his beads and pray. Like St. Bernard travelling along the shores of Lake Leman, and noticing neither the azure of the waters, nor the luxuriance of the vines, nor the radiance of the mountains with their robe of sun and snow, but bending a thought-burdened forehead over the neck of his mule; even like this monk, humanity had passed, a careful pilgrim, intent on the terrors of sin, death, and judgment, along the highways of the world, and had not known that they were sight-worthy, or that life is a blessing. J. A. SYMONDS. All the fictions of the Middle Age explain themselves as a masked or frolic expression of that which in grave earnest the mind of that period toiled to achieve. Magic, and all that is ascribed to it, is a deep presentiment of the powers of science. The shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the elements, of using the secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction. The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and the like, are alike the endeavor of the human spirit "to bend the shows of things to the desires of the mind.". EMERSON. |