unequally but
very fairly in most cases, while the earlier Middle Ages at least were
by no means ignorant of Greek.

But although there was by no means total ignorance, there was what is
to us a scarcely comprehensible want of understanding. To the average
mediaeval student, perhaps to any mediaeval student, it seems seldom or
never to have occurred that the men of whom he was reading had lived
under a dispensation so different from his own in law and in
religion, in politics and in philosophy, in literature and in science,
that an elaborate process of readjustment was necessary in order to
get at anything like a real comprehension of them. Nor was he, as a
rule, able--men of transcendent genius being rather rare, amid a more
than respectable abundance of men of talent--to take them, as Chaucer
did to a great extent, Dante more intensely though less widely, and
Shakespeare (but Shakespeare had already felt the Renaissance spirit)
fully and perfectly, on the broad ground of humanity, so that
anachronisms, and faults of costume, matter not one jot to any one but
a pedant or a fool. When he came to something in the story--something
in sentiment, manners, religion, what not--which was out of the range
of his own experience, he changed it into something within the range
of his own experience. When the whole story did not lend itself to the
treatment which he wished to apply, he changed it, added to it, left
out from it, without the slightest scruple. He had no more difficulty
in transforming the disciplined tactic of the Macedonian phalanx into
a series of random _chevauchees_ than in adjusting the much more
congenial front-fighting of Greeks and Trojans to his own ideas; and
it cost him little more to engraft a whole brand-new romantic
love-story on the Tale of Troy than to change the historical siege of
Gaza into a _Fuerres de Gadres_, of which Aimeri of Narbonne or Raoul
de Cambrai would have been the appropriate hero. Sometimes, indeed, he
simply confounded Persians and Saracens, just as elsewhere he
confounded Saracens and Vikings; and he introduced high priests of
heathen divinities as bishops, with the same _sang froid_ with which
long afterwards the translators of the Bible founded an order of
"dukes" in Edom.

A study of antiquity conducted in such a fashion could hardly have
coloured mediaeval thought with any real classicism, even if it had
been devoted to much more genuine specimens of antiquity than the
semi