Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/248

230 of unity, and the examples or precedents of ancient Rome. The resounding lines of the Aenëid on which he relies,

might come genuinely enough from a witness of the age of Augustus: in the fourteenth century, with the empire at its nadir and the Ghibellins of no small part of Italy, and Dante himself, suffering under a common proscription, they ring almost as an irony. Dante's scheme, as has been finely said, was proved not a prophecy but an epitaph.

If an attempt thus to restore the glories of the empire failed of fruit because it looked backward instead of forward, those of some of Dante's contemporaries, the literary allies of the emperor Lewis the Fourth, were not less unsuccessful because they erred in the opposite direction, because they proceeded on the basis of a more advanced polity which it needed centuries for men to understand. Both alike were disappointed by reason of their neglect of the actual circumstances of their own day. Beyond question the most notable of the latter class of theories is that of the Defensor Pacis, a book which announces a clear constitutional system such as in the present day either exists not at all or exists only in name in the greater part of Europe. Its author, Marsiglio de Maynardino, was one of those rare philosophers to whom fortune gave an opportunity of carrying their conceptions into practice; who discovered also that, however capable of constructing from the foundation, they were impotent to reconstruct in face of the old-established and irreconcilable facts of society with which they had to deal. The life of Marsiglio, of which we can only give a bare outline, is therefore of exceptional interest.