The relation between modern romanticizing literature and the real literature of the Middle Ages, is something like that between the literature of the renaissance and the ancient literatures of Greece and Rome.  But there is this difference, that, while the renaissance writers fell short of their pattern, the modern schools of romance have outgone their masters—­not perhaps in the intellectual—­but certainly in the artistic value of their product.  Mediaeval literature, wonderful and stimulating as a whole and beautiful here and there in details of execution, affords few models of technical perfection.  The civilization which it reflected, though higher in its possibilities than the classic civilization, had not yet arrived at an equal grade of development, was inferior in intelligence and the natured results of long culture.  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