but a preacher. But he lived through a crisis in the history of his country, which forced every patriotic Italian to take an active interest in politics. For a long time-up to the year 1848-there was not much for a patriot to do but to preach and to conspire. Mazzini's exile and suffering intensified that sense of loneliness which was inborn in him, and which he carried with him to his grave. The unbending nature of his convictions cut him off from fellowship with other workers for Italy. What his opinions were

when almost a lad they remained, without change or growth, till his death. The political circumstances of Europe were completely transformed in the interval, but Mazzini's views never altered. What struck others as mere perverse dogmatism was, to Mazzini's own conscience, only that fidelity to truth which is sure to bring down the censure of the wicked world. Those mutual compromises without which politics cannot be carried on at all, seemed to him, at least when asked of himself, to be a mere desertion of his faith. There is undoubtedly a noble side to such a character. Cavour, whom Mazzini never wearied of denouncing, had the fairness to recognise it. 'I admire their abnegation,' he said, speaking of Mazzini and his friends, 'I admire their abnegation, but I detest their fanaticism.' The verdict of history, will, I think, be the same. If we have to dwell rather on his fanaticism than on his virtues, it is because the former comes out far more than the latter in his public conduct and in his views of public affairs. Of his private life, which however, concerns us less here, there is but one opinion. All who knew him are agreed as to his beautiful and winning personal qualities. And as a politician-much as I think he misconceived political questions-he was a patriot in the rare sense that the welfare of his country, as he understood it, was much more value to him than his own. His followers in his own country include few or none, who have known him only by his writings; and this fact, though of bad omen for his political reputation in the future, says much for his personal worth and charm,

GREECE in the 15th & 16th CENTURIES,

BY THE

REV. A. R. VARDY, M.A.

March 28th, 1882.

THE associations connected with the name of Greece and the part which its people have taken in the intellectual history of the world, naturally give an interest to anything that concerns it. The beginnings of almost all our modern civilisation-of our poetry, history, and oratory, of our sculpture and architecture, of our metaphysical, ethical, and physical science, we trace back to the Greeks. Christianity, though not of Greek origin, is inseparably connected with the Greek language; its early literature was Greek; its doctrines were developed and its Churches were organised under the influence of Greek thought and Greek discipline. We look with interest upon the scene of a great event, upon the representatives of a great family; a like interest attaches to the later history of a country and a race to which in the first instance we owe nearly all the characteristic elements of European progress.

But, independently of this, the period of Greek history with which this paper deals is specially important as marking the transition from medieval to modern times. The society, the politics, the thoughts, which lie on the further side of the fifteenth century belong to the past; those which lie on this side of that century are still living and potent. With the conquest of Constantinople and of Greece by the Ottoman power began that Eastern question which at this hour claims so large a share of public attention. It is well to know something of the time when these changes took

place, of the circumstances that preceded and attended them, and to mark the links in this portion of the chain of universal history.

And this suggests the further consideration, that nowhere, as it seems to me, so well as in Greece, can we learn the lesson on which the first President of this Society has never been tired of insisting -the lesson of the Unity of History. It will be remembered that in his Rede Lecture* when he wishes to show "how truly all European history is one unbroken tale," it is from a single scene on the Acropolis of Athens that Mr. Freeman draws his illustration -from the day of triumph when Basil the Second went up to pay in what had been the Parthenon, and was then a Christian Church, his thank offerings to God for his victory over the Bulgarians. How varied are the events with which in earlier and in later times that same site has been connected, and yet how closely they are linked one with another! Although we cannot claim for the stories of Erechtheus and Theseus that they embody any substantial truth, yet before the Iliad was written the history of Athens had already begun, her scattered demes had been consolidated into a single state, her massive walls had in part been reared, and a temple of Athene already stood conspicuous on the hill and was the centre of reverence and worship for all the country round. The Erechtheum and the Propylaea lead us on through the great struggle between the East and the West when the Persian King saw his fleet shattered in the bay of Salamis, to the proud days of supremacy when Pericles created the Athenian empire and adorned the City with its stateliest buildings. Then come in succession the changing fortunes of the Peloponesian War; the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, and the calm contempt with which the noblest son of Athens set at nought their power; the passionate oratory of Demosthenes swaying the people crowded in the Pnyx, and rousing them to stem the full tide of Philip's conquests. The Roman power enters upon the scene. The legions of Sulla besiege the city; Cicero lingers among the memories of the past; Horace p. 48.

† Homer, Iliad, ii. 546, sqq.

Presently a new

imbues himself with Greek thought and Greek rhythm. The power of Rome decays; the Goths rush in and storm the Citadel; and the spirit of ancient Athens flashes up and wrests it from their grasp. All these and many more associations clustered around the Acropolis long before the days of Basil. In after times we see the same spot become the residence of a Frankish Duke, who erects his strong tower in the midst of the noblest works of the Periclean age. A little later and an Italian prince bequeaths the city that lies below to the Church of St. Mary, and names as his executor the Merchant Republic of Venice. conqueror appears, and Mahommed II. gazes on the realm "which Allah has given to the faithful servant of the Prophet." Two centuries later a Venetian army rescues it for a moment from the Ottoman rule, and in the struggle the Parthenon is ruined. But the city lives though the temple perishes. In our own day it has been born again to liberty, and now-with its steam factories and Chambers of Commerce, its University and Libraries, its free institutions and representative government-Athens is as full of fresh and vigorous life as any city of Western Europe.

And what is true of Athens is true of Greece generally. Wherever you turn you meet with some warning against a narrow and exclusive view of history-something that teaches you (to quote again Mr. Freeman's words,) that "the history of no age or nation can be safely fenced off from the history of its fellows."* It is so at Patras, which through all the changing fortunes of Greece-from the time of the Dorian migration down to our own days has borne the same name and maintained an unbroken existence; where Augustus planted a Roman colony; where Latin Archbishops held their Court; whose walls have sustained sieges innumerable and have been captured by Romans and barbarians, French and Genoese, Turks and Venetians, and lastly, by the Greek insurgents in the war of independence. It is so at Navarino, the legendary scene of the concealment by Hermes of the Sungod's cattle, the possible home of Homer's Nestor-the witness

* Rede Lecture, p. 50.

of Cleon's daring triumph-the haunt for many years of a succession of pirates of different races who preyed on the commerce of the Adriatic and the Egean:-then the stronghold of a Norman Prince-a Turkish, a Venetian, and again a Turkish fortress-in 1770 occupied by the Russians in their premature attempt to revolutionise Greece,-in 1827 the scene of the destruction of the Turkish and Egyptian navies by the allied fleets of England and France.

Thus it is that in Greek history the old world and the newthe East and the West are ever meeting. Wherever you explore its waters you find yourself, not in some secluded and quiet stream, but hurried into a very whirlpool of conflicting powers and causes, and sometimes borne down the central current of European life.

One question may here be asked which demands an answer.— "True," it may be said, "the land of Greece has been the scene of many stirring events in almost every age, but the history of the land is not the history of the people. Can anything like historical continuity be claimed for the Greek nation?"

This is a point on which, as is well known, very various opinions have been expressed. Some have denounced the modern Greeks as mere impostors, not Greeks at all. They have quoted the testimony of Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the 10th Century: "All Hellas and the Peloponnese was peopled by Slavs and became barbarian when the plague was desolating the earth in the days when Constantine Copronymus swayed the sceptre of the Roman Empire;" and of Mazaris, a Byzantine Satirist at the beginning of the 15th Century, who describes the population of the Peloponnese in his day as a motley rabble consisting of the scum of several nationalities, and incapable of receiving civilisation. In recent times the work of Fallmerayer on the history of the Morea, published in 1847, has been accepted as the ablest exposition of this theory, and its arguments have not only been eagerly adopted by Russian writers, but have produced an evident impression upon the judgment of Mr. Finlay, the great historian

* See Finlay's Medieval Greece, p. 21.