Romance";[15] and, in short, fights a brave battle against the artillery of “the moderns” with weapons borrowed from “the armoury of the invincible knights of old.”  The book is learned, though unsystematic and discursive, but its most interesting feature is its curiously personal note, its pure spirit of honour and Catholic piety.  The enthusiasm of the author extends itself from the institutes of chivalry and the Church to the social and political constitution of the Middle Ages.  He is anti-democratic as well as anti-Protestant; upholds monarchy, nobility, the interference of the popes in the affairs of kingdoms, and praises the times when the doctrines of legislation and government all over Europe rested on the foundations of the Church.

A few paragraphs from “The Broad Stone of Honour” will illustrate the author’s entrance into the Church through the door of beauty, and his identification of romantic art with “the art Catholic.”  “It is much to be lamented,” he writes, “that the acquaintance of the English reader with the characters and events of the Middle Ages should, for the most part, be derived from the writings of men who were either infidels, or who wrote on every subject connected with religion, with the feelings and opinions of Scotch Presbyterian preachers of the last century.” [16] “A distinguishing characteristic of everything belonging to the early and Middle Ages of Christianity is the picturesque.  Those who now struggle to cultivate the fine arts are obliged to have recourse to the despised, and almost forgotten, houses, towns, and dresses of this period.  As soon as men renounced the philosophy of the Church, it was inevitable that their taste, that the form of objects under their control, should change with their religion; for architects had no longer to provide for the love of solitude, of meditation between sombre pillars, of modesty in apartments with the lancet-casement.  They were not to study duration and solidity in an age when men were taught to regard the present as their only concern.  When nothing but exact knowledge was sought, the undefined sombre arches were to be removed to make way for lines which would proclaim their brevity, and for a blaze of light which might correspond with the mind of those who rejected every proposition that led beyond the reach of the senses. . . .  So completely is it beyond the skill of the painter or the poet to render bearable the productions of the moderns, . . . and so fast are the poor neglected works of Christian antiquity falling to ruin, that it is hard to conceive how the fine arts can be cultivated after another century has elapsed; for when children are taught in infant schools to love accounts from their cradle, and to study political economy before they have heard of the Red Cross Knight or the Wild Hunter, the manner and taste of such an age will smother the sparks of nature.” [17] The Church summoned all natural beauty to the ministry of religion.  “Flowers bloomed