One sees instantly that neither Francis of Assisi nor Bacon of Verulam could have hoped for peace with the schools; twelfth-century ecstasy felt the futility of mere rhetoric quite as keenly as seventeenth-century scepticism was to feel it; and yet when Francis died in 1226 at Assisi, Thomas was just being born at Aquino some two hundred kilometres to the southward.  True scholasticism had not begun.  Four hundred years seem long for the human mind to stand still—­or go backward; the more because the human mind was never better satisfied with itself than when thus absorbed in its mirror; but with that chapter we have nothing to do.  The pleasantest way to treat it was that of Saint Francis; half-serious, half-jesting; as though, after all, in the thought of infinity, four hundred years were at most only a serio-comic interlude.  At Assisi, once, when a theologian attacked Fra Egidio by the usual formal arraignment in syllogisms, the brother waited until the conclusions were laid down, and then, taking out a flute from the folds of his robe, he played his answer in rustic melodies.  The soul of Saint Francis was a rustic melody and the simplest that ever reached so high an expression.  Compared with it, Theocritus and Virgil are as modern as Tennyson and ourselves.

All this shows only what Saint Francis was not; to understand what he was and how he goes with Saint Bernard and Saint Victor through the religious idyll of Transition architecture, one must wander about Assisi with the “Floretum” or “Fioretti” in one’s hand;—­the legends which are the gospel of Francis as the evangels are the gospel of Christ, who was reincarnated in Assisi.  We have given a deal of time to showing our own sceptical natures how simple the architects and decorators of Chartres were in their notions of the Virgin and her wants; but French simple-mindedness was already complex compared with Italian.  The Virgin was human; Francis was elementary nature itself, like sun and air; he was Greek in his joy of life:—­

...  Recessit inde et venit inter Cannarium et Mevanium.  Et respexit quasdam arbores juxta viam in quibus residebat tanta multitudo avium diversarum quod nunquam in partibus illis visa similis multitudo.  In campo insuper juxta praedictas arbores etiam multitudo maxima residebat.  Quam multitudinem sanctus Franciscus respiciens et admirans, facto super eum Spiritu Dei, dixit sociis:  “Vobis hic me in via exspectantibus, ibo et praedicabo sororibus nostris aviculis.”  Et intravit in campum ad aves quae residebant in terra.  Et statim quum praedicare incepit omnes aves in arboribus residentes descenderunt ad eum et simul cum aliis de campo immobiles perman serunt, quum tamen ipse inter eas iret plurimas tunica contingendo.  Et nulla earum penitus movebatur, sicut recitavit frater Jacobus de Massa, sanctus homo, qui omnia supradicta habuit ab ore fratris Massei, qui fuit unus de iis qui tune erant socii sancti patris.