influence as great as did the Aristotelian system during the Middle
Ages. We must never forget, that during the two centuries which
commence with the fall of Constantinople, and end with our civil wars,
not merely almost all great thinkers, but courtiers, statesmen,
warriors, poets, were more or less Neoplatonists. The Greek
grammarians, who migrated into Italy, brought with them the works of
Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus; and their gorgeous reveries were
welcomed eagerly by the European mind, just revelling in the free
thought of youthful manhood. And yet the Alexandrian impotence for any
practical and social purposes was to be manifested, as utterly as it was
in Alexandria or in Athens of old. Ficinus and Picus of Mirandola
worked no deliverance, either for Italian morals or polity, at a time
when such deliverance was needed bitterly enough. Neoplatonism was
petted by luxurious and heathen popes, as an elegant play of the
cultivated fancy, which could do their real power, their practical
system, neither good nor harm. And one cannot help feeling, while
reading the magnificent oration on Supra-sensual Love, which
Castiglione, in his admirable book "The Courtier," puts into the mouth
of the profligate Bembo, how near mysticism may lie not merely to
dilettantism or to Pharisaism, but to sensuality itself. But in
England, during Elizabeth's reign, the practical weakness of
Neoplatonism was compensated by the noble practical life which men were
compelled to live in those great times; by the strong hold which they
had of the ideas of family and national life, of law and personal faith.
And I cannot but believe it to have been a mighty gain to such men as
Sidney, Raleigh, and Spenser, that they had drunk, however slightly, of
the wells of Proclus and Plotinus. One cannot read Spenser's "Fairy
Queen," above all his Garden of Adonis, and his cantos on Mutability,
without feeling that his Neoplatonism must have kept him safe from many
a dark eschatological superstition, many a narrow and bitter dogmatism,