No sooner indeed was James driven from the throne than the Primate fell back into the servile king-worship of an England that was passing away. Within the closed gates of Lambeth he debated endlessly with himself and with his fellow-bishops the questions of "de jure" and "de facto" rightto the crown. Every day he sheered further and further from the actual world around him. Newton, who was with him at Lambeth when it was announced that the Convention had declared the throne vacant, found that Sancroft's thoughts were not with England or English freedom—they were concentrated on the question whether James's child were a supposititious one or no. "He wished," he said, "they had gone on a more regular method and examined into the birth of the young child. There was reason," he added, "to believe he was not the same as the first, which might easily be known, for he had a mole on his neck." The new Government bore long with the old man, and Bancroft for a time seems really to have wavered. He suffered his chaplains to take the oaths and then scolded them bitterly for praying for William and Mary. He declined to take his seat at the Council board, and yet issued his commission for the consecration of Burnet. At last his mind was made up and the Government on his final refusal to take the oath of allegiance had no alternative but to declare the see vacant.
For six months Bancroft was still suffered to remainin his house, though Tillotson was nominated as his successor. With a perfect courtesy, worthy of the saintly temper which was his characteristic, Tillotson waited long at the deprived Archbishop's door desiring a conference. But Sancroft refused to see him. Evelyn found the old man in a dismantled house, bitter at his fall. "Say 'nolo,' and say it from the heart," he had replied passionately to Beveridge when he sought his counsel on the offer of a bishopric. Others asked whether after refusing the oaths they might attend worship where the new sovereigns were prayed for. "If they do," answered Sancroft, "they will need the Absolution at the end as well as at the beginning of the service." In the answer lay the schism of the Nonjurors, and to this schism Sancroft soon gave definite form. On Whitsunday the new Church was started in the archiepiscopal Chapel. The throng of visitors was kept standing at the palace gate. No one was admitted to the Chapel but some fifty who had refused the oaths. The Archbishop himself consecrated: one Nonjuror reading the prayers, another preaching. A formal action of ejectment was the answer to this open defiance, and on the evening of its decision in favour of the Crown Sancroft withdrewquietly by boat over Thames to the Temple. He was soon followed by many who, amidst the pettiness of his public views, could still realize the grandeur of his self-devotion. To one, the Earl of Aylesbury, the Archbishop himself opened the door. His visitor, struck with the change of all he saw from the pomp of Lambeth, burst into tears and owned how deeply the sight affected him. "O my good lord," replied Sancroft, "rather rejoice with me, for now I live again."
With Sancroft's departure opens a new age of Lambeth's ecclesiastical history. The Revolution which flung him aside had completed the work of the great Rebellion in sweeping away for ever the old pretensions of the primates to an autocracy within the Church of England. But it seemed to have opened a nobler prospect in placing them at the head of the Protestant Churches of the world. In their common peril before the great Catholic aggression, which found equal support at Paris and Vienna, the Reformed communities of the Continent looked for aid and sympathy to the one Reformed Church whose position was now unassailable. The congregations of the Palatinate appealed to Lambeth when they were troddenunder foot beneath the horse-hoofs of Turenne. The same appeal came from the Vaudois refugees in Germany, the Silesian Protestants, the Huguenot churches that still fought for existence in France, the Calvinists of Geneva, the French refugees who had forsaken their sunny homes in the south for the Gospel and God. In the dry letter-books on the Lambeth shelves, in the records of bounty dispensed through the Archbishop to the persecuted and the stranger, in the warm and cordial correspondence with Lutheran and Calvinist, survives a faint memory of the golden visions which filled Protestant hearts after the accession of the great Deliverer. "The eyes of the world are upon us," was Tenison's plea for union with Protestants at home. "All the Reformed Churches are in expectation of something to be done which may make for union and peace." When a temper so cold as Tenison's could kindle in this fashion it is no wonder that more enthusiastic minds launched into loftier expectations—that Leibnitz hoped to see the union of Calvinist and Lutheran accomplished by a common adoption of the English Liturgy, that a High Churchman like Nicholls revived the plan, which Cranmer had proposed and Calvin had supported, of a general council ofProtestants to be held in England. One by one such visions faded before the virulence of party spirit, the narrowness and timidity of Churchmen, the base and selfish politics of the time. Few men had higher or more spiritual conceptions of Christian unity than Tenison; yet the German translation of our Liturgy, stamped with the royal monogram of King Frederick, which still exists in the library, reminds us how in mere jealousy of a Tory triumph Tenison flung away the offer of a union with the Church of Prussia. The creeping ambition of Dubois foiled whatever dreams Archbishop Wake may have entertained of a union with the Church of France.
From the larger field of political and ecclesiastical history we may turn again ere we close to the narrower limits of the Lambeth Library. The storm which drove Sancroft from his house left his librarian, Henry Wharton, still bound to the books he loved so well. Wharton is one of those instances of precocious developement which are rarer in the sober walks of historical investigation than in art. It is a strange young face that we see in the frontispiece to his sermons, the impression of its broad, high brow andprominent nose so oddly in contrast with the delicate, feminine curves of the mouth, and yet repeated in the hard, concentrated gaze of the large, full eyes which look out from under the enormous wig. Wharton was the most accomplished of Cambridge students when he quitted the University at twenty-two to aid Cave in his 'Historia Litteraria.' But the time proved too exciting for a purely literary career. At Tenison's instigation the young scholar plunged into the thick of the controversy which had been provoked by the aggression of King James, and his vigour soon attracted the notice of Sancroft. He became one of the Archbishop's chaplains, and was presented in a single year to two of the best livings in his gift. With these however save in his very natural zeal for pluralities he seems to have concerned himself little. It was with the library which now passed into his charge that his name was destined to be associated. Under him its treasures were thrown liberally open to the ecclesiastical antiquaries of his day—to Hody, to Stillingfleet, to Collier, to Atterbury, and to Strype, who was just beginning his voluminous collections towards the illustration of the history of the sixteenth century. But no one made so much use of the documents in hischarge as Wharton himself. In them, no doubt, lay the secret of his consent to take the oath, to separate from his earlier patron, to accept the patronage of Tenison. But there was no permanent breach with Sancroft; on his deathbed the Archbishop committed to him the charge of editing Laud's papers, a charge redeemed by his publication of the 'Troubles and Trials' of the Archbishop in 1694.
But this with other labours were mere by-play. The design upon which his energies were mainly concentrated was "to exhibit a complete ecclesiastical history of England to the Reformation," and the two volumes of the 'Anglia Sacra,' which appeared during his life, were intended as a partial fulfilment of this design. Of these, as they now stand, the second is by far the more valuable. The four archiepiscopal biographies by Osbern, the three by Eadmer, Malmesbury's lives of Aldhelm and Wulstan, the larger collection of works by Giraldus Cambrensis, Chaundler's biographies of Wykeham and Bekington, and the collection of smaller documents which accompanied these, formed a more valuable contribution to our ecclesiastical history than had up to Wharton's timeever been made. The first volume contained the chief monastic annals which illustrated the history of the sees whose cathedrals were possessed by monks; those served by canons regular or secular were reserved for a third volume, while a fourth was to have contained the episcopal annals of the Church from the Reformation to the Revolution.
The last however was never destined to appear, and its predecessor was interrupted after the completion of the histories of London and St. Asaph by the premature death of the great scholar. In 1694 Battely writes a touching account to Strype of his interview with Wharton at Canterbury:—"One day he opened his trunk and drawers, and showed me his great collections concerning the state of our Church, and with a great sigh told me his labours were at an end, and that his strength would not permit him to finish any more of that subject." Vigorous and healthy as his natural constitution was he had worn it out with the severity of his toil. He denied himself refreshment in his eagerness for study, and sat over his books in the bitterest days of winter till hands and feet were powerless with the cold. At last nature abruptly gaveway, his last hopes of recovery were foiled by an immoderate return to his old pursuits, and at the age of thirty-one Henry Wharton died a quiet scholar's death. Archbishop Tenison stood with Bishop Lloyd by the grave in Westminster, where the body was laid "with solemn and devout anthems composed by that most ingenious artist, Mr. Harry Purcell;" and over it were graven words that tell the broken story of so many a student life:—"Multa ad augendam et illustrandam rem literariam conscripsit; plura moliebatur."
The library no longer rests in those quiet rooms over the great cloister in which a succession of librarians, such as Gibson and Wilkins and Ducarel, preserved the tradition of Henry Wharton. The 'Codex' of the first, the 'Concilia' of the second, and the elaborate analysis of the Canterbury Registers which we owe to the third are, like Wharton's own works, of primary importance to the study of English ecclesiastical history. It was reserved for our own day to see these memories swept away by the degradation of the cloister into a kitchen yard and a scullery; but the Great Hall of Archbishop Juxon, to which by a happy fortune the books were transferred, has seen in Dr. Maitland andProfessor Stubbs keepers whose learning more than rivals the learning of Wharton himself. It is not without significance that this great library still lies open to the public as a part and a notable part of the palace of the chief prelate of the English Church. Even if Philistines abound in it the spirit and drift of the English Church have never been wholly Philistine. It has managed somehow to reflect and represent the varying phases of English life and English thought; it has developed more and more a certain original largeness and good-tempered breadth of view; amidst the hundred jarring theories of itself and its position which it has embraced at one time or another it has never stooped to the mere "pay over the counter" theory of Little Bethel. Above all it has as yet managed to find room for almost every shade of religious opinion; and it has answered at once to every national revival of taste, of beauty, and of art.
Great as are the faults of the Church of England, these are merits which make men who care more for the diffusion of culture than for the propagation of this shade or that shade of religious opinion shrink from any immediate wish for her fall. And they are meritswhich spring from this, that she is still a learned Church, not learned in the sense of purely theological or ecclesiastical learning, but a Church which is able to show among its clergy men of renown in every branch of literature, critical, poetical, historical, or scientific. How long this distinction is to continue her own it is hard to say; there are signs indeed in the theological temper which is creeping over the clergy that it is soon to cease. But the spirit of intelligence, of largeness of view, of judicious moderation, which is so alien from the theological spirit, can still look for support from the memories of Lambeth. Whatever its influence may have been, it has not grown out of the noisy activity of theological "movement." Its strength has been to sit still and let such "movements" pass by. It is by a spirit the very opposite of theirs—a spirit of conciliation, of largeness of heart, that it has won its power over the Church. None of the great theological impulses of this age or the last, it is sometimes urged, came out of Lambeth. Little of the theological bitterness, of the controversial narrowness of this age or the last, it may fairly be answered, has ever entered its gates. Of Lambeth we may say what Matthew Arnold says of Oxford, that many as are itsfaults it has never surrendered itself to ecclesiastical Philistines. In the calm, genial silence of its courts, its library, its galleries, in the presence of its venerable past, the virulence, the petty strife, the tumult of religious fanaticism finds itself hushed. Amongst the storm of the Wesleyan revival, of the Evangelical revival, of the Puseyite revival, the voice of Lambeth has ever pleaded for a truth simpler, larger, more human than theirs. Amid the deafening clamour of Tractarian and anti-Tractarian disputants both sides united in condemning the silence of Lambeth. Yet the one word that came from Lambeth will still speak to men's hearts when all their noisy disputations are forgotten. "How," a prelate, whose nearest relative had joined the Church of Rome, asked Archbishop Howley, "how shall I treat my brother?" "As a brother," was the Archbishop's reply.
Autumn brings its congresses—scientific, ecclesiastical, archæological—but the prettiest of autumnal congresses is the children's congress by the sea. It is like a leap from prose into poetry when we step away from Associations and Institutes, from stuffy lecture-rooms and dismal sections, to the strip of sand which the children have chosen for their annual gathering. Behind us are the great white cliffs, before us the reach of grey waters with steamers and their smoke-trail in the offing and waves washing lazily in upon the shore. And between sea and cliff are a world of little creatures, digging, dabbling, delighted. What strikes us at first sight is the number of them. In ordinary life we meet the great host of children in detail, as it were; we kiss our little ones in the morning, we tumble over a perambulator, we dodge a hoop, we pat back a ball. Child after child meets us, but we neverrealize the world of children till we see it massed upon the sands. Children of every age, from the baby to the schoolboy; big children and tiny children, weak little urchins with pale cheeks and plump little urchins with sturdy legs; children of all tempers, from the screeching child in arms to the quiet child sitting placid and gazing out of large grey eyes; gay little madcaps paddling at the water's edge; busy children, idle children, children careful of their dress, hoydens covered with sand and seaweed, wild children, demure children—all are mustered in the great many-coloured camp between the cliffs and the sea.
It is their holiday as it is ours, but what is a mere refreshment to us is life to them. What a rapture of freedom looks up at us out of the little faces that watch us as we thread our way from group to group! The mere change of dress is a revolution in the child's existence. These brown-holland frocks, rough sunshades, and sandboots, these clothes that they may wet and dirty and tear as they like, mean deliverance from endless dressings—dressings for breakfast and dressings for lunch, dressings to go out with mamma and dressings to come down to dessert—an escape fromfashionable little shoes and tight little hats and stiff little flounces that it is treason to rumple. There is an inexpressible triumph in their return at eventide from the congress by the sea, dishevelled, bedraggled, but with no fear of a scolding from nurse. Then too there is the freedom from "lessons." There are no more of those dreadful maps along the wall, no French exercises, no terrible arithmetic. The elder girls make a faint show of keeping up their practising, but the goody books which the governess packed carefully at the bottom of their boxes remain at the bottom unopened. There is no time for books, the grave little faces protest to you; there is only time for the sea. That is why they hurry over breakfast to get early to the sands, and are moody and restless at the length of luncheon. It is a hopeless business to keep them at home; they yawn over picture-books, they quarrel over croquet, they fall asleep over draughts. Home is just now only an interlude of sleeping or dining in the serious business of the day.
The one interest of existence is in the sea. Its novelty, its vastness, its life, dwarf everything else in the little minds beside it. There is the endlesswatching for the ships, the first peep at the little dot on the horizon, the controversies as it rises about its masts or its flag, the questions as to where it is coming from and where it is going to. There is the endless speculation on the tide, the doubt every morning whether it is coming in or going out, the wonder of its perpetual advance or retreat, the whispered tales of children hemmed in between it and the cliffs, the sense of a mysterious life, the sense of a mysterious danger. Above all there is the sense of a mysterious power. The children wake as the wind howls in the night, or the rain dashes against the window panes, to tell each other how the waves are leaping high over the pier and ships tearing to pieces on reefs far away. So charming and yet so terrible, the most playful of playfellows, the most awful of possible destroyers, the child's first consciousness of the greatness and mystery of the world around him is embodied in the sea.
It is amusing to see the precision with which the children's congress breaks up into its various sections. The most popular and important is that of the engineers. The little members come toddling down from the cliffs with a load of implements, shouldering rakeand spade, and dangling tiny buckets from their arms. One little group makes straight for its sand-hole of yesterday, and is soon busy with huge heaps and mounds which are to take the form of a castle. A crowing little urchin beside is already waving the Union Jack which is ready to crown the edifice, if the Fates ever suffer it to be crowned. Engineers of less military taste are busy near the water's edge with an elaborate system of reservoirs and canals, and greeting with shouts of triumph the admission of the water to miniature little harbours. A corps of absolutely unscientific labourers are simply engaged in digging the deepest hole they can, and the blue nets over their sunshades are alone visible above the edge of the excavation. It is delightful to watch the industry, the energy, the absolute seriousness and conviction of the engineers. Sentries warn you off from the limits of the fortress; you are politely asked to "please take care," as your clumsy foot strays along the delicate brink of the canal. Suggestions that have a mechanical turn about them, hints on the best way of reaching the water or the possibility of a steeper slope for the sand-walls, are listened to with attention and respect. You are rewarded by an invitation which allows you towitness the very moment when the dyke is broken and the sea admitted into basin and canal, or the yet more ecstatic moment when the Union Jack waves over the completed castle.
Indolence and adventure charm the dabblers, as industry absorbs the engineers. The sands are of all earthly spots the most delightful; but a greater delight than any earthly spot can afford awaits the dabbler in the sea. It is mostly the girls who dabble; the gaiety and frolic suit them better than the serious industry of castles and canals. Deliverance from shoes and stockings, the first thrill of pleasure and surprise at the cool touch of the water, the wild rush along the brim, the dainty advance till the sea covers the little ankles, the tremulous waiting with an air of defiance as the wave deepens round till it touches the knee, the firm line with which the dabblers grasp hand in hand and face the advancing tide, the sudden panic, the break, the disorderly flight, the tears and laughter, the run after the wave as it retreats again, the fresh advance and defiance—this is the paradise of the dabbler. Hour after hour, with clothes tucked round their waist and a lavish display of stout little legs, theurchins wage their mimic warfare with the sea. Meanwhile the scientific section is encamped upon the rocks. With torn vestments and bruised feet the votaries of knowledge are peeping into every little pool, detecting mussel-shells, picking up seaweed, hunting for anemones. A shout of triumph from the tiny adventurer who has climbed over the rough rock-shelf announces that he has secured a prize for the glass jar at home, where the lumps of formless jelly burst into rosy flowers with delicate tendrils waving gently round them for food. A cry of woe tells of some infantile Whymper who has lost his hold on an Alpine rock-edge some six inches high. Knowledge has its difficulties as well as its dangers, and the difficulty of forming a rock-section in the face of the stern opposition of mothers and nurses is undoubtedly great. Still, formed it is, and science furnishes a goodly company of votaries and martyrs to the congress by the sea.
But of course the naval section bears away the palm. It is for the most part composed of the elder boys and of a few girls who would be boys if they could. Its members all possess a hopeless passion for the sea, and besiege their mothers for promises that their future lifeshall be that of middies. They wear straw hats and loose blue shirts, and affect as much of the sailor in their costume as they can. Each has a boat, or as they call it a "vessel," and the build and rig of these vessels is a subject of constant discussion and rivalry in the section. Much critical inquiry is directed to the propriety of Arthur's jib, or the necessity of "ballasting" or pouring a little molten lead into Edward's keel. The launch of a new vessel is the event of the week. The coast-guardsman is brought in to settle knotty questions of naval architecture and equipment, and the little seamen listen to his verdicts, his yarns, the records of his voyages, with a wondering reverence. They ask knowingly about the wind and the prospects of the weather; they submit to his higher knowledge their theories as to the nature and destination of each vessel that passes; they come home with a store of naval phrases which are poured recklessly out over the tea-table. The pier is a favourite haunt of the naval section. They delight in sitting on rough coils of old rope. Nothing that is of the sea comes amiss to them. "I like the smell of tar," shouts a little enthusiast. They tell tales among themselves of the life of a middie and the fun of the "fo-castle," and watch the wavesleaping up over the pier-head with a wild longing to sing 'Rule Britannia.' Every ship in the offing is a living thing to them, and the appearance of a man-of-war sends them sleepless to bed.
There is but one general meeting of the children's congress, and that is in front of the bathing-machines. Rows of little faces wait for their turn, watching the dash of the waves beneath the wheels, peeping at the black-robed figures who are bobbing up and down in the sea, half longing for their dip, half shrinking as the inevitable moment comes nearer and nearer, dashing forward joyously at last as the door opens and the bathing woman's "Now, my dear," summons them to the quaint little box. One lingers over the sight as one lingers over a bed of flowers. There is all the fragrance, the colour, the sweet caprice, the wilfulness, the delight of childhood in the tiny figures that meet us on the return from their bath, with dancing eyes and flushed cheeks and hair streaming over their shoulders. What a hero the group finds in the urchin who never cries! With what envy they regard the big sister who never wants to come out of the water! It is pleasantto listen to their prattle as they stroll over the sands with a fresh life running through every vein, to hear their confession of fright at the first dip, their dislike of putting their head under water, their chaff of the delicate little sister who "will only bathe with mamma." Mammas are always good-humoured by the sea; papas come out of their eternal newspaper and toss the wee brats on their shoulders, uncles drop down on the merry little group with fresh presents every day. The restraint, the distance of home vanishes with the practical abolition of the nursery and the schoolroom. Home, schoolroom, nursery, all are crammed together in the little cockleshell of a boat where the little ones are packed round father and mother and tossing gaily over the waves. What endless fun in the rising and falling, the creaking of the sail, the gruff voice of the boatman, the sight of the distant cliffs, the flock of sea-gulls nestling in the wave-hollows! The little ones trail their hands in the cool water and fancy they see mermaids in the cool green depths. The big boy watches the boatman and studies navigation. The little brother dips a hook now and then in a fond hope of whiting. The tide has come in ere they return, andthe little voyagers are lifted out, tired and sleepy, in the boatman's arms, to dream that night of endless sailings over endless seas.
It is a terrible morning that brings the children news of their recall to the smoke and din of town. They wander for a last visit down to the beach, listen for the last time to the young bandit in his Spanish sombrero who charms the nursery-maids with lays of love, club their pence for a last interview with the itinerant photographer. It is all over; the sands are thinner now, group after group is breaking up, autumn is dying into winter, and rougher winds are blowing over the sea. But the sea is never too rough for the little ones. With hair blown wildly about their faces they linger disconsolately along the brink, count the boats they shall never see again, make pilgrimages to the rock caves to tell its separate story of enjoyment in each of them, and fling themselves with a last kiss on the dear, dear sands! Then they shoulder their spade and rake, and with one fond look at the cliffs turn their backs on the sea. But the sea is with them still, even when the crowded train has whirled them far from waves that the white gull skims over. They havetheir tales of it to tell to their governess, their memories of it to count over before they fall asleep, their dreams of it as they lie asleep, their hopes of seeing it again when weary winter and spring and summer have at last slipped away. They listen to stories of wrecks, and find a halfpenny for the sham sailor who trolls his ballads in the street. Now and then they look lovingly at the ships and the sand-buckets piled away in the play-cupboard. So with one abiding thought at their little hearts the long days glide away till autumn finds them again children by the sea.
The one story in the history of the modern world which rivals in concentrated interest the story of Athens is the story of Florence in the years just before and after the opening of the fourteenth century—the few years, that is, of its highest glory in freedom, in letters, in art. Never since the days of Pericles had such a varied outburst of human energy been summed up in so short a space. Architecture reared the noble monuments of the Duomo and Santa Croce. Cimabue revolutionized painting, and then "the cry was Giotto's." Italian poetry, preluded by the canzonets of Guido Cavalcanti and his rivals, rose to its fullest grandeur in the 'Commedia' of Dante. Italian prose was born in the works of Malaspina and Dino. Within, the Florentines worked out patiently and bravely amidst a thousand obstacles the problem of free and popular government. Without, they covered sea andland with their commerce; their agents supplied the Papal treasury, while private firms were already beginning that career of vast foreign loans which at a later time enabled the victor of Crécy to equip his armies with Florentine gold.
We can only realize the attitude of Florence at this moment by its contrast with the rest of Europe. It was a time when Germany was sinking down into feudal chaos under the earlier Hapsburgs. The system of despotic centralization invented by St. Louis and perfected by Philippe le Bel was crushing freedom and vigour out of France. If Parliamentary life was opening in England, literature was dead, and a feudalism which had become embittered by the new forms of law which the legal spirit of the age gave it was pressing harder and harder on the peasantry. Even in Italy Florence stood alone. The South lay crushed beneath the oppression of its French conquerors. In the North the earlier communal freedom had already made way for the rule of tyrants when it was just springing into life in the city by the Arno. For it is noteworthy that of all the cities of Italy Florence is the most modern. Genoa and Pisa had been rivals incommercial activity a hundred years before the merchants of Florence were known out of Tuscany. Sicily had caught the gift of song from the Provençal troubadours half a century before the Florentine singers. Too insignificant to share in the great struggle of the Empire and the Papacy, among the last to be divided into Guelph and Ghibelline, Florence emerged into communal greatness when that of Milan or Bologna was already in decay.
The City of the Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni sets us face to face with this awakening, with this patient pitiful struggle. His 'Chronicle' indeed has been roughly attacked of late by the sweeping scepticism of German critics, but the attack has proved an unsuccessful one. The strongest evidence of its genuineness indeed lies in the impression of a distinctpersonality which is left on us by a simple perusal of the 'Chronicle' itself. Some of its charm no doubt rises from the naïve simplicity of Dino's story-telling. With him and with his contemporaries, Malaspina, Dante, and Villani, Italian prose begins; and we can hardly fancy a better training in style for any young Italian than to be brought face to face in Dino with the nervous picturesque accents that marked the birth of his mother-tongue. But the charm is more one of character than one of style. Throughout we feel the man, a man whose temper is so strongly and clearly marked in its contrast with so reflective a temper as Villani's that the German theory which makes his chronicle a mere cento from the later work hardly needs discussion. Dino has the quaint directness, the dramatic force, the tenderness of Froissart, but it is a nobler and more human tenderness; a pity not for the knight only, but for knight and burgher as well. The sham tinsel of chivalry which flutters over the pages of the gay Canon of Liège is exchanged in Dino for a manly patriotism, a love of civic freedom, of justice, of religion. In his quiet way he is a great artist. There is an Herodotean picturesqueness as well as an Herodotean simplicity in such a picture as thatof Dante's first battle-field, the Florentine victory of Campaldino:—
"On the appointed day the men of Florence advanced their standards to go into the enemies' land, and passed by Casentino along an ill road where, had the enemy found them, they had received no little damage; but such was not the will of God. And they came near to Bibbiena, at a place called Campaldino where was the enemy, and there they halted in array of battle. The captains of war sent the light-armed foot to the front; and each man's shield, with a red lily on a white ground, was stretched out well before him. Then the Bishop, who was short-sighted, asked, 'Those there: what walls be they?' They answered him, 'The shields of the enemy.' Messer Barone de' Mangiadori da San Miniato, a chevalier frank and well skilled in deeds of arms, gathered his men-at-arms together and said to them, 'My masters, in Tuscan wars men were wont to conquer by making a stout onset, and that lasted but a while, and few men died, for it was not in use to kill. Now is the fashion changed, and men conquer by holding their ground stoutly, wherefore I counsel you that ye stand firm and let them assault you.' Andso they settled to do. The men of Arezzo made their onset with such vigour and so great force that the body of the Florentines fell back not a little. The fight was hard and keen. Messer Corso Donati with a brigade of the men of Pistoja charged the enemy in flank; the quarrels from the crossbows poured down like rain; the men of Arezzo had few of them, and were withal charged in flank where they were exposed; the air was covered with clouds, and there was a very great dust. Then the footmen of Arezzo set themselves to creep under the bellies of the horses, knife in hand, and disembowelled them, and some of them penetrated so far that in the very midst of the battalion were many dead of either part. Many that were counted of great prowess were shown vile that day, and many of whom none spoke word won honour.... The men of Arezzo were broken, not by cowardice or little prowess, but by the greater number of their enemies were they put to the rout and slain. The soldiers of Florence that were used to fighting slew them; the villeins had no pity."
"On the appointed day the men of Florence advanced their standards to go into the enemies' land, and passed by Casentino along an ill road where, had the enemy found them, they had received no little damage; but such was not the will of God. And they came near to Bibbiena, at a place called Campaldino where was the enemy, and there they halted in array of battle. The captains of war sent the light-armed foot to the front; and each man's shield, with a red lily on a white ground, was stretched out well before him. Then the Bishop, who was short-sighted, asked, 'Those there: what walls be they?' They answered him, 'The shields of the enemy.' Messer Barone de' Mangiadori da San Miniato, a chevalier frank and well skilled in deeds of arms, gathered his men-at-arms together and said to them, 'My masters, in Tuscan wars men were wont to conquer by making a stout onset, and that lasted but a while, and few men died, for it was not in use to kill. Now is the fashion changed, and men conquer by holding their ground stoutly, wherefore I counsel you that ye stand firm and let them assault you.' Andso they settled to do. The men of Arezzo made their onset with such vigour and so great force that the body of the Florentines fell back not a little. The fight was hard and keen. Messer Corso Donati with a brigade of the men of Pistoja charged the enemy in flank; the quarrels from the crossbows poured down like rain; the men of Arezzo had few of them, and were withal charged in flank where they were exposed; the air was covered with clouds, and there was a very great dust. Then the footmen of Arezzo set themselves to creep under the bellies of the horses, knife in hand, and disembowelled them, and some of them penetrated so far that in the very midst of the battalion were many dead of either part. Many that were counted of great prowess were shown vile that day, and many of whom none spoke word won honour.... The men of Arezzo were broken, not by cowardice or little prowess, but by the greater number of their enemies were they put to the rout and slain. The soldiers of Florence that were used to fighting slew them; the villeins had no pity."
"Pity" is almost the characteristic word of Dino Compagni—pity alike for foe or friend; for thewarriors of Arezzo or the starved-out patriots of Pistoja as well as for the heroes of his own Florence; pity for the victims of her feuds, and even for the men who drove them into exile; pity, most of all, for Florence herself. We read his story indeed at first with a strange sense of disappointment and surprise. To the modern reader the story of Florence in the years which Dino covers is above all the story of Dante. As the 'Chronicle' jots patiently down the hopes and fears, the failures and successes of the wiser citizens in that struggle for order and good government which brought Dante to his long exile, we feel ourselves standing in the very midst of events out of which grew the threefold Poem of the After-World and face to face with the men who front us in the 'Inferno' and 'Paradise.' But this is not the world Dino stands in. Of what seem to us the greater elements of the life around him he sees and tells us nothing. Of art or letters his 'Chronicle' says never a word. The name of Dante is mentioned but once and then without a syllable of comment. It is not in Dante that Dino interests himself: his one interest, his one passion is Florence.
And yet as we read page after page a new interest inthe story grows on us, the interest that Dino himself felt in the tragedy around him. Our sympathies go with that earnest group of men to which he belonged, men who struggled honestly to reconcile freedom and order in a State torn with antipathies of the past, with jealousies and ambitions and feuds of the present. The terrible sadness of the 'Divina Commedia' becomes more intelligible as we follow step by step the ruin of those hopes for his country which Dante entertained as well as Dino. And beyond this interest there is the social picture of the Florence of the fourteenth century itself, its strange medley of past and present, the old world of feudalism jostling with the new world of commerce, the trader elbowing the noble and the artisan the trader, an enthusiastic mystical devotion jealous of the new classicalism or the scepticism of men like Guido Cavalcanti, the petty rivalries of great houses alternating with large schemes of public policy, the tenderest poetry with brutal outrage and lust, the art of Giotto with the slow, patient bloodthirst of the vendetta.
What was the cause—the question presses on us through every page of Dino or of Dante—what was thecause of that ruin which waited in Florence as in every Italian city on so short a burst of freedom? What was it that foiled alike the counsel of statesmen and the passionate love of liberty in the people at large? What was it which drove Dante into exile and stung the simple-hearted Dino into a burst of eloquent despair? The answer—if we set aside the silly talk about "democracy" and look simply at the facts themselves—is a very simple one. The ruin of Florentine liberty, like the ruin of liberty elsewhere throughout Italy, lay wholly with itsnoblesse. It was equally perilous for an Italian town to leave its nobles without the walls or to force them to reside within. In their own robber-holds or their own country estates they were a scourge to the trader whose wains rolled temptingly past their walls. Florence, like its fellow Italian States, was driven to the demolition of the feudal castles, and to enforcing the residence of their lords within its own civic bounds. But the danger was only brought nearer home. Excluded by civic jealousy, wise or unwise, from all share in municipal government, their huge palazzi rose like fortresses in every quarter of the city. Within them lay the noble, a wild beast all the fiercer for his confinement in so narrow a den, with the old tastes,hatreds, preferences utterly unchanged, at feud as of old with his fellow-nobles, knit to them only by a common scorn of the burghers and the burgher life around them, stung to madness by his exclusion from all rule in the commonwealth, bitter, revengeful, with the wilfulness of a child, shameless, false, unprincipled.
The story which lies at the opening of the great feud between Guelph and Ghibelline in Florence throws a picturesque light on the temper of its nobility. Buondelmonte, the betrothed lover of a daughter of Oderigo Giantrufetti, passes beneath a palace of the Donati at whose window stands Madonna Aldruda with her two fair daughters. Seeing him pass by Aldruda calls aloud to him, pointing with her finger to the damsel by her side. "Whom have you taken to wife?" she says, "This is the wife I kept for you." The damsel pleased the youth, but his troth bound him, and he answered, "I can wed none other, now at any rate!" "Yes," cried Aldruda, "for I will pay the penalty for thee." "Then will I have her," said Buondelmonte. "Cosa fatta capo ha," was the famous comment of the outraged house—"stone dead has no fellow"—and as Dino puts it, in the most ordinary way in the world, "theysettled to kill him the day he was to have married the damsel, and so they did." "Kill, kill," echoes everywhere through the story of these Florentine nobles. Assassination is an event of every day. Corso Donati sends murderers to kill an enemy among the Cerchi. Guido Cavalcanti strives to stab Corso in the back as he passes him. Where the dagger fails, they try poison without scruple. The best of them decline a share in a murder much as an Irish peasant may decline a share in an agrarian outrage, with a certain delicacy and readiness to stand by and see it done. When the assassination of the Bishop of Arezzo was decided on, Guglielmo da Pazzi, who was in the counsel, protested "he would have been content had it been done without his knowledge, but were the question put to him he might not be guilty of his blood."
Among such men even Corso Donati towers into a certain grandeur:—
"Knight he was of great valour and renown, gentle of blood and manners, of a most fair body even to old age, comely in figure, with delicate features, and a white skin; a pleasing, prudent, and eloquent speaker;one who ever aimed at great ends; friend and comrade of great lords and nobles; a man too of many friends and great fame throughout all Italy. Foe he was of the people and its leaders; the darling of soldiers, full of evil devices, evil-hearted, cunning."
"Knight he was of great valour and renown, gentle of blood and manners, of a most fair body even to old age, comely in figure, with delicate features, and a white skin; a pleasing, prudent, and eloquent speaker;one who ever aimed at great ends; friend and comrade of great lords and nobles; a man too of many friends and great fame throughout all Italy. Foe he was of the people and its leaders; the darling of soldiers, full of evil devices, evil-hearted, cunning."
Such was the man who drove Dante into exile:—
"Who for his pride was called 'Il Barone,' so that when he passed through the land many cried 'Viva Il Barone!' and the land seemed all his own."
"Who for his pride was called 'Il Barone,' so that when he passed through the land many cried 'Viva Il Barone!' and the land seemed all his own."
He stood not merely at the head of the Florentine nobility, but at the head of the great Guelph organization which extended from city to city throughout Tuscany—a league with its own leaders, its own policy, its own treasure. In the attempt to seize this treasure for the general service of the State the most popular of Florentine leaders, Giano della Bella, had been foiled and driven into exile. An honest attempt to secure the peace of the city by the banishment of Corso and his friends brought about the exile of Dante. It is plain that powerless as they were before the united forces of the whole people the nobles were strongenough by simply biding their time and availing themselves of popular divisions to crush one opponent after another. And yet the struggle against them was one of life and death for the city. No atom of the new civilization, the new spirit of freedom or humanity, seems to have penetrated among them. Behind the gloomy walls of their city fortresses they remained the mere murderous tyrants of a brutal feudalism. "I counsel, lords, that we free ourselves from this slavery," cried Berto Frescobaldi to his brother nobles in the church of San Jacopo; "let us arm ourselves and run on to the Piazza, and there kill friend and foe alike as many as we find, so that neither we nor our children be ever subject to them more." Those who, like Sismondi, censure the sternness of the laws which pressed upon the nobles forget what wild beasts they were intended to hold down. Their outbreaks were the blind outbreaks of mere ruffians. The victory of Corso over Dante and the wiser citizens was followed by a carnival of bloodshed, firing of houses, pillage and lawlessness which wrings from Dino curses as bitter as those of the 'Inferno.'
From the hopeless task of curbing the variouselements of disorder by the single force of each isolated city the wiser and more patriotic among the men of that day turned in despair to the Empire. Guelph and Ghibelline, Papalist and Imperialist, were words which as Dante saw had now lost their old meaning. In the twelfth century the Emperor was at once the foe of religion and the one obstacle to the rising freedom of the towns. In the fourteenth that freedom had either perished by its own excesses, or, as at Florence, was strong enough to defy even an Imperial assailant. Religion found its bitterest enemy in such a Pope as Boniface VIII., or the church over which he ruled. Whatever might have been its fortune under happier circumstances, the great experiment of democratic self-government, of free and independent city-states, had failed, whether from the wars of city with city, or from the civil feuds that rent each in sunder. The papacy could furnish no centre of union; its old sanctity was gone, its greed and worldliness weakened it every day. On the other hand, the remembrance of the tyranny of Barbarossa, of the terrible struggle by which the peace of Constance had been won, had grown faint and dim in the course of years. It was long since Italy had seen an Emperor at all.
But the old Ghibellinism had recovered new vigour from an unlooked-for quarter. As the revival of the Roman law had given an artificial prestige to the Empire in the twelfth century, so the revival of classical literature threw a new halo around it in the fourteenth. To Dante, penetrated with the greater Latin authors, Henry of Luxemburg is no stranger from over the Alps, but the descendant of the Augustus whom his own Vergil had loved and sung. The same classical feeling tells on Dino. With him Florence is "the daughter of Rome." The pages of Sallust and of Livy have stirred him to undertake her annals. "The remembrance of ancient histories has long spurred my mind to write the events, full of danger yet reaching to no prosperous end, that this noble city, daughter of Rome, has encountered." It was the same sense that united with his own practical appreciation of the necessities of the time in his impatient longing for the intervention of the new Emperor. As Prior, Dino had acted the part of a brave and honest man, striving to conciliate party with party, refusing to break the law, chased at last with the rest of the magistracy from the Palace of the Signory by the violence of Corso Donati and the nobles. If he did not share Dante's exile, he had atany rate acted with Dante in the course of policy which brought that penalty on him. Both were Priors together in 1300; both have the same passionate love of Florence, the same haughty disdain of the factions that tore it to pieces. If the appeal of Dino to his fellows in Santa Trinità is less thrilling than the verse of Dante, it has its own pathetic force:—"My masters, why will ye confound and undo so good a city? Against whom do ye will to fight? Against your brethren? What victory will ye gain?—none other than weeping!" The words fell on deaf ears, and the smoke of burning streets, slaughter, and exile forced Dino to look to the stranger. There is something strangely touching in the dry, passionless way in which he tracks Henry of Luxemburg from city to city, the fire of his real longing only breaking out here and there in pettish outbursts at each obstacle the Emperor finds. The weary waiting came to nothing. Dino leaves us still looking for Henry's coming; Dante tells us of the death that dashed all hope to the ground. Even in the hour of his despair the poet could console himself by setting his "divino Arrigo" in the regions of the blest. What comfort the humble chronicler found whose work we have been studying none can know.