Walter of Varila, a more fictitious character, represents the ‘healthy animalism’ of the Teutonic mind, with its mixture of deep earnestness and hearty merriment.  His dislike of priestly sentimentalities is no anachronism.  Even in his day, a noble lay-religion, founded on faith in the divine and universal symbolism of humanity and nature, was gradually arising, and venting itself, from time to time, as I conceive, through many most unsuspected channels, through chivalry, through the minne-singers, through the lay inventors, or rather importers, of pointed architecture, through the German school of painting, through the politics of the free towns, till it attained complete freedom in Luther and his associate reformers.

For my fantastic quotations of Scripture, if they shall be deemed irreverent, I can only say, that they were the fashion of the time, from prince to peasant—­that there is scarcely one of them with which I have not actually met in the writings of the period—­that those writings abound with misuse of Scripture, far more coarse, arbitrary, and ridiculous, than any which I have dared to insert—­ that I had no right to omit so radical a characteristic of the Middle Age.

For the more coarse and homely passages with which the drama is interspersed, I must make the same apology.  I put them there because they were there—­because the Middle Age was, in the gross, a coarse, barbarous, and profligate age—­because it was necessary, in order to bring out fairly the beauty of the central character, to show ‘the crooked and perverse generation’ in which she was ’a child of God without rebuke.’  It was, in fact, the very ferocity and foulness of the time which, by a natural revulsion, called forth at the same time the Apostolic holiness and the Manichean asceticism of the Mediaeval Saints.  The world was so bad that, to be Saints at all, they were compelled to go out of the world.  It was necessary, moreover, in depicting the poor man’s patroness, to show the material on which she worked; and those who know the poor, know also that we can no more judge truly of their characters in the presence of their benefactors, than we can tell by seeing clay in the potter’s hands what it was in its native pit.  These scenes have, therefore, been laid principally in Elizabeth’s absence, in order to preserve their only use and meaning.

So rough and common a life-picture of the Middle Age will, I am afraid, whether faithful or not, be far from acceptable to those who take their notions of that period principally from such exquisite dreams as the fictions of Fouque, and of certain moderns whose graceful minds, like some enchanted well,

In whose calm depths the pure and beautiful
Alone are mirrored,