or a quarrel with his
neighbour, but with no taste for national wars, and the prolonged
absence from his home which they might involve, unless indeed there was
a reasonable prospect of plunder. Indeed, he was a very matter-of-fact
person, with very little sense of romance, and little taste for
adventure unless there was something to be got out of it. We must
dismiss from our minds the pretty superstitions of romance from Chaucer
and Spenser to the time of the Romantic revival, and we must understand
that the people of the Middle Ages were very much like ourselves; the
times were rougher, more disorderly, there was much less security, but
on the whole the character of human life was not very different.

What was it, then, that happened with the end of the ancient world?
Well, the civilization of the Roman Empire was overthrown by our
barbarous ancestors, the old order, and tranquillity, and comfort
disappeared, and the world fell back into discomfort and turbulence, and
disorder; the roads fell into disrepair and were not mended, the drains
were neglected, and the towns dwindled and shrank. We must remember,
however, that this great civilization was dying out, was failing by some
internal weakness, and that the barbarians only hastened the process.

Much of the achievement of Greece and Rome was lost, much both material
and intellectual, but not all, and the new civilization which began
rapidly to grow up on the ruins of the old was in many respects
continuous with it. In order, however, that we may understand this we
must remember that the form of civilization with which the Middle Ages
were continuous was the Graeco-Roman civilization of the later Empire,
and not the great Hellenic civilization itself. What the Middle Ages
knew was primarily that which the Christian Fathers like St. Augustine
and St. Gregory the Great, St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nazianzus
learned at their schools and universities. Some of these Fathers were
educated at the great universities, like Athens, others at comparatively
humble provincial institutions; some of them were men of powerful
intellect, while others were more commonplace. What they learned was the
general intellectual system of the late Empire, and what they learned
they handed on to the Middle Ages; but it was not the great intellectual
culture of Greece. We have still too strong an inclination to think of
the ancient world as one and homogeneous; we have not yet sufficiently
appr