to sainthood or execrates her as
the chief impediment to holiness. Common sense, sanity of judgment,
acceptance of things as they are, resolution to ameliorate the evils
and to utilise the goods of life, seem everywhere deficient. Men are
obstinate in misconception of their proper aims, wasting their
energies upon shadows instead of holding fast by realities, waiting
for a future whereof they know nothing, in lieu of mastering and
economising the present. The largest and most serious undertakings of
united Europe in this period--the Crusades--are based upon a radical
mistake. "Why seek ye the living among the dead? Behold, He is not
here, but risen!" With these words ringing in their ears, the nations
flock to Palestine and pour their blood forth for an empty sepulchre.
The one Emperor who attains the object of Christendom by rational
means is excommunicated for his success. Frederick II. returns from
the Holy Land a ruined man because he made a compact useful to his
Christian subjects with the Chief of Islam.

II.

Such are some of the stereotyped ideas which crowd our mind when we
reflect upon the Middle Ages. They are certainly one-sided. Drawn for
the most part from the study of monastic literature, exaggerated by
that reaction against medievalism which the Renaissance initiated,
they must be regarded as inadequate to represent the whole truth. At
no one period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the close of
the thirteenth century was the mental atmosphere of Europe so
unnaturally clouded. Yet there is sufficient substance in them to
justify their formulation. The earlier Middle Ages did, in fact,
extinguish antique civility. The later Middle Ages did create, to use
a phrase of Michelet, an army of dunces for the maintenance of
orthodoxy. The intellect and the conscience became used to moving
paralytically among visions, dreams, and mystic terrors, weighed down
with torpor, abusing virile faculties for the suppression of truth and
the perpetuation of revered error.

It is, therefore, with a sense of surprise, with something like a
shock to preconceived opinions, that we first become acquainted with
the medieval literature which it is my object in the present treatise
to make better known to English readers. That so bold, so fresh, so
natural, so pagan a view of human life as the Latin songs of the
Wandering Students exhibit, should have found clear and artistic
utterance in the epoch of the Crusad