Third of England upwards of three hundred thousand marks, at a
time when the mark contained more silver than fifty shillings of
the present day, and when the value of silver was more than
quadruple of what it now is. The city and its environs contained
a hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants. In the various
schools about ten thousand children were taught to read; twelve
hundred studied arithmetic; six hundred received a learned
education.

The progress of elegant literature and of the fine arts was
proportioned to that of the public prosperity. Under the despotic
successors of Augustus, all the fields of intellect had been
turned into arid wastes, still marked out by formal
boundaries, still retaining the traces of old cultivation, but
yielding neither flowers nor fruit. The deluge of barbarism came.
It swept away all the landmarks. It obliterated all the signs of
former tillage. But it fertilised while it devastated. When it
receded, the wilderness was as the garden of God, rejoicing on
every side, laughing, clapping its hands, pouring forth, in
spontaneous abundance, everything brilliant, or fragrant, or
nourishing. A new language, characterised by simple sweetness and
simple energy, had attained perfection. No tongue ever furnished
more gorgeous and vivid tints to poetry; nor was it long before a
poet appeared who knew how to employ them. Early in the
fourteenth century came forth the Divine Comedy, beyond
comparison the greatest work of imagination which had appeared
since the poems of Homer. The following generation produced
indeed no second Dante: but it was eminently distinguished by
general intellectual activity. The study of the Latin writers had
never been wholly neglected in Italy. But Petrarch introduced a