relations to their families, highly coloured doubtless, but thereby leaving around them, amidst ridiculous fables, useful remembrances, and traditions capable of bearing good fruit. Thus in Germany, Italy, and France, in the monasteries, in the castles of the feudal lords, and even in the lowest ranks of society, were deposited precious mementos, destined at a somewhat later period to be turned to account. All these unknown travellers, carrying the arts of their own countries into distant lands, brought back others not less precious, and made, without perception on their parts, more advantageous exchanges than all those of commerce. By these means, not only the trade in silks, porcelain, and Indian commodities became extended and more practicable, opening up new routes to commercial industry and activity, but what was of still greater consequence, foreign manners, unknown nations, and extraordinary productions, crowded upon the minds of Europeans, repressed since the fall of the Roman Empire into too narrow a circle. They began to estimate properly the finest, the best-peopled, and the most anciently-civilised of the four quarters of the globe. They set about studying the arts, creeds, and idioms of the nations who inhabited it, and there was even a project for establishing a chair of the Tartar language in the university of Paris. {149} Romantic accounts, being soon investigated and valued as they deserved, spread on all sides more just and comprehensive ideas. The world seemed to open on the side of the East; geography made a prodigious stride; and an ardour for discoveries became the new direction which the adventurous spirit of Europeans fell into. When our own hemisphere was better known, the idea of another ceased to present itself to the mind as a paradox stripped of all likelihood; and it was upon an expedition in search of the Zipango of Marco Polo, that Christopher Columbus discovered the New World.' Here we see how vast and novel a world was opened to the European mind by means of circumstances brought about by the impulse of the crusades in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. We cannot doubt it to have been one of the most powerful causes of the mental development and freedom which broke forth at the end of that great era.