11LEDIAEVAL ITALY.*
Turf title of this book unites two names which are connected traditionally with romance. The romance of the Middle Ages, however, is to a large extent illusory, for they were hard, narrow, literal, materialistic. In the opinion ,of Bishop Stubbs, their character might bo summed up as " a race for wealth " : but this definition is equally true of other periods. Gross ignorance is, in reality, their prevailing note. In addition to this defect and to their rapacious greed, they wore brutal and violent, given over to fanaticism and superstition: two vices which always go together and are too often described as piety. The ao-called Ages of Faith wore a time of immorality and ferocity. Never, perhaps, within historical times was life on the whole so miserable or the human mind so abject as in most of the period covered by Mr. Cotterill's volume. There can be no doubt that Europe was much worse off between a.D. 300 and 1300 than it had been for a couple of thousand years before. On the other band, Italy is a place and a term of genuine romance: fascinating, enchanting, wherever we may touch her ; from the grey • Mediaeval Daly during a Thousand Years : 305:1313. By H. B. Cotterill. London : Harrap and Co. 17s. 6d. net.]
Virgilian dreams of her earliest legends, the reigns of Saturn and Evander, through the splendours of Augustus and the Antoninea, and the golden hours of the Renaissance, down to the comfort- able eighteenth century and the sleepy Papal Rome of Piranesi. Through it all, Italy was majestic in her greatness, tragio in her sorrows, pathetio in her desolation, but never commonplace, and always adorable. The Dee Roma is the Goddess of an Eternal City. If the Lateran Basilica, the Cathedral of the Roman bishopric, may claim, and rightfully, to be the mother of all Western Churches, Italy herself is assuredly the intellectual mistress and teacher, the second or ideal country, of every civilized European ; for there is no civilization in Europe except what has come to us transmitted through the Latin genius.
Mr. Cotterill has set himself the ambitious task of condensing the Italian history of a thousand years into five hundred and fifty pages. It is a long and complicated story. To handle it victoriously in that apace would task the strength of a Gibbon and encumber the wit of a Volt airs. Mr. Cotterill does not rise above his subject or move at ease. There can Abe no question. however, about his industry and his extensive reading ; though he is not always accurate in details. For instance, he says (p. 44) that "in the days of Caesar the army of Rome was composed exclusively of Roman citizens " ; but Caesar records that he formed a legion, Alauda, or " The Lark," from Gallic recruits : ex trans. alphas conscriptam, as Suetonius writes emphatically, and it was only after being disciplined and used that these mon were rewarded with the citizenship. This was an abnormal case, no doubt, and the legions wore not recruited from barbarians until later ; but Caesar and other writers of his period talk of foreign cavalry and of various light troops supplied by the subjects and allies of Rome. Mr. Cotterill'a " exclusively," then, is not accurate ; and if historical summaries bo not accurate in detail they fail to justify their existence. This defect is too common in the sort of volume which Mr. Cotterill has contributed to a series on " The Groat Nations." Beyond other work, condensed history should be written with lucidity and skill, should be planned care- fully, and, above all, should be precise in detail. Otherwise it is precisely wrong, and so deceives the unlearned by showing them history out of focus or in a false perspective.
Tho making of many histories does not necessarily bring now facts to light, unless contemporary evidence is produced for the first time ; but as the old materials of Watery are handled and rehandled, as they are looked at more impartially and with fuller knowledge, many traditional views are changed. This is true especially of ecclesiastical affairs, which until quite recently were never treated coolly or with 'a scientific detachment. Mr. Cotterill reminds us (p. 173) of a certain Agnellus of Ravenna, who, " when facts failed him " in writing his Lives of the Pontiffs, "relied on God and the prayers of the brethren to inspire his imagination." Too much ecclesiastical history has been composed in a similar way ; and perhaps no fallacy is more deceptive than the acceptance of clerical histories as a true and complete representation of their times.
The record of Italy during Mr. Cotterill's thousand years is melancholy reading. It is a catalogue of barbarian inroads, foreign domination, domostio faction, and general misrule, all of them augmented, and sometimes caused, by ecclesiastical ambition. Hordes of " lewd and greedy Germans," as Gibbon calls them, though disguised under various names, afflicted the country through these dreary centuries. Fortu- nately, they never submerged it. Tho original stock and the relies of its civilization survived; or the whole of Europe, exterior to Prussia, would have been Germanized, which, thank Heaven ! it was not, and never will be. So far from the great Italians being of Germanic origin, according to the impudent modern theory, we believe that the German settlers were thoroughly Italianized by environment, intermarriage, and contact with civilization, though the undiluted German is not civilizable, and ho still carries on war by the atrocious methods of his predecessors. Neither civilization nor freedom is of Germanic origin ; feudalism, which is the antithesis of personal and (Me liberty, is the natural and unchanging product of the Germans, and it was inflicted by them upon all the nations which they conquered. Freedom surely was the creation of the Greek and the ideal of the Latin race ; for which the latter has struggled passionately through its chequered and glorious history ; not always wisely, for, as Livy says of them, avide ruendo ad liberlatem in servitutent lapses. In battling for European liberty and civilization, the Romans found it advisable to allow no Germans over the Rhine, the Alps, and the Danube. The miseries of Italy only began when these barriers were forced. Let us hope that they will now be restored, and maintained with the same vigour and strictness as of old.
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