asburg, the "Arme Heinrich" of Harmann von Aue, the chronicles of
Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissart, the "Morte Artus," the "Dies
Irae," the lyrics of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadour, and of the
minnesinger Walter von der Vogelweide, the Spanish Romancero, the poems
of the Elder Edda, the romances of "Amis et Amile" and "Aucassin et
Nicolete," the writings of Villon, the "De Imitatione Christi" ascribed
to Thomas a Kempis. Dante was a great name and fame, but he was virtually
unread.

There is nothing strange about this; many of these things were still in
manuscript and in unknown tongues, Old Norse, Old French, Middle High
German, Middle English, Mediaeval Latin. It would be hazardous to assert
that the general reader, or even the educated reader, of to-day has much
more acquaintance with them at first hand than his ancestor of the
eighteenth century; or much more acquaintance than he has with
Aeschuylus, Thucydides, and Lucretius, at first hand. But it may be
confidently asserted that he knows much more _about_ them; that he thinks
them worth knowing about; and that through modern, popular versions of
them--through poems, historical romances, literary histories, essays and
what not--he has in his mind's eye a picture of the Middle Age, perhaps
as definite and fascinating as the picture of classical antiquity. That
he has so is owing to the romantic movement. For the significant
circumstance about the attitude of the last century toward the whole
medieval period was, not its ignorance, but its incuriosity. It did not
want to hear anything about it.[2] Now and then, hints Pope, an
antiquarian pedant, a university don, might affect an admiration for some
obsolete author:

"Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote,
And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote:
One likes no language but the 'Faery Queen';
A Scot will fight for 'Christ's Kirk o' the Green.'"[3]

But, furthermore, the great body of Elizabethan and Stuart literature was
already obsolescent. Dramatists of the rank of Marlowe and Webster,
poets like George Herbert and Robert Herrick--favorites with our own
generation--prose authors like Sir Thomas Browne--from whom Coleridge and
Emerson drew inspiration--had fallen into "the portion of weeds and
outworn faces." Even writers of such recent, almost contemporary, repute
as Donne, whom Carew had styled

"--a king who ruled, as he thought fit,
The universal monarch of w