jumble of Gnosticism and Manicheism, professed
that since evil is coeval with good it must be just as justifiable; hence
there is nothing blamable, everything is relative and morality--
unobligatory--a matter of taste.

Provence, always receptive to Orientalisms, was charmed with theories
that gave a mystic sanction to troubadourian views. Caught up and
repeated, discussed in tournament and tenson, the opinions of ladies and
lovers on the subject would have disturbed nobody, history would have
ignored them, had the original heretics been satisfied with the plaything
they had found. But they compared it to official religion. They also
questioned the prerogatives of the Holy See.

Indignantly the Papacy pitted Christianity against it, as already it had
pitted the latter against Islam. In this instance with greater success.
From a thousand pulpits a new religious war was preached. The fanaticism
of Europe was aroused. Provence was stormed. Chateaux were levelled, vines
uprooted, the harvests of poetry and song destroyed. Sixty thousand people
were massacred. The Inquisition was founded. Plentifully the doctors of
the gay science were burned. In spite of chivalry, in spite of love, in
spite of verse, in spite of Muhammad, the Moors and the Madonna, Europe
was barbarous still.

The smoke, obscuring the sky, left but darkness. If anywhere there was
light, it was in Sicily, always volcanic, or in Tuscany, another Provence.
There surviving troubadours escaped and left a legacy which Dante,
Petrarch and Boccaccio diversely shared.

V

THE APOTHEOSIS

In the boyhood of Dante, Florence, the Flower City, was a place of much
beauty, of perfect calm, of almost perfect equality, of pleasurable and
polished life. There a brigade, the _Brigata Amorosa_, formed of a
thousand people, had a lord who was a Lord of Love. During one of their
recurrent festivals an entertainment was held at the home of Folco
Portinari. To such entertainments Boccaccio said that children frequently
accompanied their parents. To this particular entertainment, Dante, then a
lad of nine, came with his father. He found there a number of boys and
girls, among whom was Folco's daughter, Beatrice, a child with delicate
features whose speech and attitude were perhaps superserious for her age.

Dante looked at her. "At that moment," he afterward, wrote, "I may truly
say that the spirit of life which dwells in the most secret chambers of my
heart, trembl