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FORE:But before the dissolving action of Nominalism had become fully manifest, its ascendency was once more challenged; and this time, also, the philosophical impulse came from Constantinople. Greek scholars, seeking help in the West, brought with them to Florence the complete works of Plato; and these were shortly made accessible to a wider public through the Latin translation of Ficino. Their influence seems at first to have told in favour of mysticism, for this was the contemporary tendency to which they could be most readily affiliated; and, besides, in swinging back from Aristotles philosophy to the rival form of spiritualism, mens minds naturally reverted, in the first instance, to what had once linked them togetherthe system of Plotinus. Thus Platonism was studied through an Alexandrian medium, and as the Alexandrians had looked at it, that is to say, chiefly under its theological and metaphysical aspects. As such, it became the accepted philosophy of the Renaissance;369 and much of what we most admire in the literatureat least the English literatureof that period, is directly traceable to Platonic influence. That the Utopia of Sir Thomas More was inspired by the Republic and the Critias is, of course, obvious; and the great part played by the ideal theory in Spensers Faery Queen, though less evident, is still sufficiently clear. As Mr. Green observes in his History of the English People (II., p. 413), Spenser borrows, in fact, the delicate and refined forms of the Platonic philosophy to express his own moral enthusiasm.... Justice, Temperance, Truth are no mere names to him, but real existences to which his whole nature clings with a rapturous affection. Now it deserves observation, as illustrating a great revolution in European thought, that the relation of Plato to the epic of the English Renaissance is precisely paralleled by the relation of Aristotle to the epic of mediaeval Italy. Dante borrows more than his cosmography from the Stagirite. The successive circles of Hell, the spirals of Purgatory, and the spheres of Paradise, are a framework in which the characters of the poem are exhibited, not as individual actors whom we trace through a lifes history, but as types of a class and representatives of a single mental quality, whether vicious or virtuous. In other words, the historical arrangement of all previous poems is abandoned in favour of a logical arrangement. For the order of contiguity in time is substituted the order of resemblance and difference in idea. How thoroughly Aristotelian, indeed, were the lines within which mediaeval imagination moved is proved by the possibility of tracing them in a work utterly different from Dantesthe Decameron of Boccaccio. The tales constituting this collection are so arranged that each day illustrates some one special class of adventures; only, to make good Aristotles principle that earthly affairs are not subject to invariable rules, a single departure from the prescribed subject is allowed in each decade; while370 during one entire day the story-tellers are left free to choose a subject at their own discretion.As a means of popularity, they insisted on the standing army being abolished in time of peace, on the strict limitation of placemen in Parliament, and on the return to triennial Parliaments. These were hard topics for the patriots now in power to digest. But the depression of trade continued, and no one could suggest a remedy but that of reducing taxation at the very time that all parties were zealous for the prosecution of the war. Finding no other solution to their difficulties, the public turned again to the demand of an inquiry into the administration of Walpole, hoping to lay bare in that the causes of their sufferings. Accordingly Lord Limerick, on the 23rd of March, rose and proposed a committee to inquire into the administration of Walpole, not for twenty, but for the last ten years. Pulteney not only voted, but spoke in favour of this motion, and it was carried by a majority of seven. Lord Limerick was chosen chairman, and such was the partial and vindictive spirit in which they went to work in examining papers and witnesses, that the honourable-minded Sir John Barnard, though so staunch an opponent of Walpole when in power, declared that he would no longer take part in the labours of a committee which displayed so little regard to the general inquiry, but concentrated all their efforts on the ruin of one individual.
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