s and intervals of a no
less profound delight. There is in it the sense of death, to a strange
and, at first sight, almost unintelligible extent. Only when one
remembers the long night of the religious wars which was just about to
fall on France, just as after Spenser, Puritan as he was, after Carew
and Herrick still more, a night of a similar character was about to fall
on England, does the real reason of this singular idiosyncrasy appear.
The company of the _Heptameron_ are the latest representatives, at first
hand, and with no deliberate purpose of presentment, of the mediaeval
conception of gentlemen and ladies who fleeted the time goldenly. They
are not themselves any longer mediaeval; they have been taught modern
ways; they have a kind of uneasy sense (even though one and another of
themselves may now and then flout the idea) of the importance of other
classes, even of some duty on their own part towards other classes.
Their piety is a very little deliberate, their voluptuous indulgence has
a grain of conscience in it and behind it, which distinguishes it not
less from the frank indulgence of a Greek or a Roman than from the still
franker naivete of purely mediaeval art, from the childlike, almost
paradisiac, innocence of the Belli-cents and Nicolettes and of the
daughter of the great Soldan Hugh in that wonderful serio-comic
_chanson_ of the _Voyage a Constantinople_. The mark of modernity is on
them, and yet they are so little conscious of it, and so perfectly free
from even the slightest touch of at least its anti-religious influence.
Nobody, not even Hircan, the Grammont of the sixteenth century; not
even Nomerfide, the Miss Notable of her day and society; not even the
haughty lady Ennasuite, who wonders whether common folk can be supposed
to have like passions with us, feels the abundant religious services and
the periods of meditation unconscionable or tiresome.

And so we have here three notes constantly sounding together or in
immediate sequence. There is the passion of that exquisite _rondeau_
of Marot's, which some will have, perhaps not impossibly, to refer to
Margaret herself--

En la baisant m'a dit: "Amy sans blasme,
Ce seul baiser, qui deux bouches embasme,
Les arrhes sont du bien tant espere,"
Ce mot elle a doulcement profere,
Pensant du tout apaiser ma grand flamme.
Mais le mien cour adonc plus elle enflamme,
Car son alaine odorant plus que basme
Soufflo