-that was composed of gorgeous ceremonial, of
exquisite architecture, of superabundant energy and life, and of these
only, you would neither appreciate the many influences which wrought
upon the men and women of those days, nor estimate at their true worth
the changing events, on which we now look back in the large
perspective of so many generations. And in that strange century the
sorrow and the pain of a world in travail are as evident as its joy.
The feverish excitement with which it grasped at life and pleasure is
counterbalanced, and explained by the ever-present horror of death in
its most ghastly forms.

When a fact of this eternal and natural significance is once frankly
recognised and bravely faced, men do not think much about it
afterwards, and say less. In the ages when the greatest of the
cathedrals were built the personification of death is practically
unknown. Archaeologists may imagine they discover it; but I shall never
believe that a single carving of it existed before the close of the
fifteenth century. Life they knew, not only in all its varied forms,
but as the soul. Sin they knew, and carved not merely in the full
shame of the act but in the person of the father of sin, the devil,
bat-winged and taloned, hovering over his prey on earth, or driving
his victims after death into gaping Hellmouth where his torturers
awaited them. But it was only when printing excited men's
imaginations, when the first discovery of the ancient classics roused
their emulation and stimulated their unrest, when the Renaissance in
art increased their eagerness to express their thoughts and multiplied
their methods of expression, when the Reformation turned their
conscience to the latter end and to the unseen world--only at such a
time of speculation and disquiet did Death himself appear, personified
and hideously exultant. The waters were troubled and the slime beneath
them came up to the surface. Instead of the bold imaginations of God
or man or beast which the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries knew,
you find a crowd of tiny imps and monkeys, like the verminous throng
upon the Portail des Marmousets at St. Ouen; the higher forms of
creation disappeared before the presence of the Arch-Enemy.

There arose not only a great contempt for the value of human life, but
a gross familiarity with death. The poor man, dying in his unregarded
thousands, clutched to his starved heart the one consolation that the
rich could not escape