e. The
epithets of Gothic ignorance, rudeness, and barbarism, which the
eighteenth-century critics applied so freely to all the issue of the
so-called dark ages, were not entirely without justification. Dante is
almost the only strictly mediaeval poet in whose work the form seems
adequate to the content; for Boccaccio and Petrarca stand already on the
sill of the renaissance.

In the arts of design the case was partly reversed. If the artists of
the renaissance did not equal the Greeks in sculpture and architecture,
they probably excelled them in painting. On the other hand, the
restorers of Gothic have never quite learned the secret of the mediaeval
builders. However, if the analogy is not pushed too far, the romantic
revival may be regarded as a faint counterpart, the fragments of a
half-forgotten civilization were pieced together; Greek manuscripts
sought out, cleaned, edited, and printed: statues, coins, vases dug up
and ranged in museums: debris cleared away from temples, amphitheaters,
basilicas; till gradually the complete image of the antique world grew
forth in august beauty, kindling an excitement of mind to which there are
few parallels in history; so, in the eighteenth century, the despised
ages of monkery, feudalism, and superstition began to reassert their
claims upon the imagination. Ruined castles and abbeys, coats of mail,
illuminated missals, manuscript romances, black-letter ballads, old
tapestries, and wood carvings acquired a new value. Antiquaries and
virtuosos first, and then poets and romancers, reconstructed in turn an
image of medieval society.

True, the later movement was much the weaker of the two. No such fissure
yawned between modern times and the Middle Ages as had been opened
between the ancient world and the Middle Ages by the ruin of the Roman
state and by the barbarian migrations. Nor had ten centuries of rubbish
accumulated over the remains of mediaeval culture. In 1700 the Middle
Ages were not yet so very remote. The nations and languages of Europe
continued in nearly the same limits which had bounded them two centuries
before. The progress in the sciences and mechanic arts, the discovery
and colonizing of America, the invention of printing and gunpowder, and
the Protestant reformation had indeed drawn deep lines between modern and
mediaeval life. Christianity, however, formed a connecting link, though,
in Protestant countries, the continuity between the earlier and la