t must be added, in the foolishness of many of the
conceptions of the Romantic revival.

There are, indeed, excuses for these mistakes and confusions. The
Renaissance represents, among other things, a great and necessary
movement of revolt against a religious and intellectual civilization
which had once been living and moving, but had tended from the latter
years of the thirteenth century to grow stiff and rigid. It was probably
a real misfortune that the great thinkers and scholars of the thirteenth
century, like Alexander of Hales and Thomas Aquinas, had embarked upon
what was a premature attempt at the systematization of all knowledge;
they made the same mistake as the Encyclopaedists of the eighteenth
century or Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth, but with more disastrous
results. For this work unhappily encouraged the mediaeval Church in its
most fatal mistake, its tendency to suspect and oppose the apprehensions
of new aspects of truth.

The men of the Renaissance had to break the forms under which the
schoolmen had thought to express all truth, they had to carry forward
the great enterprise and adventure of the discovery of truth, and they
had to do this in the teeth of a violent resistance on the part of those
who thought themselves the representatives of the mediaeval
civilization. There are, therefore, excuses for them in their contempt
for the intellectual life of the past; but there is no real excuse for
them in their contempt for mediaeval art and literature. When they
turned their back upon the immediate past, and endeavoured pedantically
to reproduce the ancient world, they were guilty of an outrageous
ignorance and stupidity, a stupidity which is expressed in that unhappy
phrase of Pope, the 'Gothic night'. Happily neither the great artists of
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries nor the great poets of England
and Spain were much affected by the classical pedantry of which
unhappily Petrarch was the begetter.

It is this foolishness of the Renaissance which is the best excuse for
the foolishness of the Romantic revival; the new classical movement had
in such a degree interrupted the continuity of European art that it was
very difficult for men in the eighteenth century to recover the past,
and we must make allowance for the often ludicrous terms and forms of
the new mediaevalism. Indeed it is a strange and often absurd art--the
half-serious, half-parodying imitations of Thomson and Walpole and
Wielan