III. PRIDE OF SYSTEM II. ROMAN RENAISSANCE 115

thee ...; thy merchants from thy youth, they shall wander every one to his quarter; none shall save thee.”*¹

§ 86. III. PRIDE OF SYSTEM. I might have illustrated these evil principles from a thousand other sources, but I have not time to pursue the subject farther, and must pass to the third element above named, the Pride of System. It need not detain us so long as either of the others, for it is at once more palpable and less dangerous. The manner in which the pride of the fifteenth century corrupted the sources of knowledge, and diminished the majesty, while it multiplied the trappings, of state, is in general little observed; but the reader is probably already well and sufficiently aware of the curious tendency to formulization and system which, under the name of philosophy, encumbered the minds of the Renaissance schoolmen. As it was above stated [§ 32], grammar became the first of sciences; and whatever subject had to be treated, the first aim of the philosopher was to subject its principles to a code of laws, in the observation of which the merit of the speaker, thinker, or worker, in or on that subject, was thereafter to consist; so that the whole mind of the world was occupied by the exclusive study of Restraints. The sound of the forging of fetters was heard from sea to sea. The doctors of all the arts and sciences set themselves daily to the invention of new varieties of cages and manacles; they themselves wore, instead of gowns, a chain mail, whose purpose was not so much to avert the weapon of the adversary as to restrain the motions of the wearer; and all the acts, thoughts, and workings of mankind,-poetry, painting, architecture, and philosophy,-were reduced by them merely to so many different forms of fetter-dance.

§ 87. Now, I am very sure that no reader who has given any attention to the former portions of this work, or the tendency of what else I have written, more especially the

* Isaiah xlvii. 7, 10, 11, 15.

¹ [Here the chapter in the “Travellers’ Edition” (vol. ii. ch. iii.), entitled “The Street of the Tombs,” ends. The next chapter in that edition begins at § 92 below.]

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