notable happenings, with pageants and with tragedies. Moreover, he is
writing of his own times, and of times of which men yet living could recall
great deeds in which they bore a part. He was, besides, a poet and a writer of
Romance. In all this he stands nearer to Homer in the Mycenaean decadence,
to the Jewish historians in the Captivity, to Shakespeare brooding over the
heroic past among the Osrics and the Guildensterns, than he does to the
detached, enquiring temper of modern historians, many of whom would,
doubtless, gladly barter pages of Froissart's narrative for a glimpse of the
Manorial Rolls lost in the Peasants' Revolt.

Men did not fall asleep, one night, in the Middle Ages, to awaken, the next
morning in the Renaissance. Yet, out of the long and obscure agony of
transition, there certainly emerges an epoch, very different in temper from
that which had gone before. But, while the former term merely seems to
indicate a span of time between an earlier and a later Age, the name
"Renaissance" clearly claims a special character--an Age in which something
has been re-born. It is easy, therefore, to forget that the Middle Ages were,
themselves, a Renaissance, and that the thing re-born in them, consciously and
with pangs, was Rome. Charlemagne and Otto I, alike, claimed to resuscitate
and re-impose the Empire of the West; not to found a new Empire, but to
bring to life, verily and indeed, the Empire of the Western Caesars. It is this
theory which distinguishes the Middle Ages, theoretical as they were in their
whole temper, the theory that the proper mould of Europe, for all time, was
the Roman Empire. Dr. Coulton rightly insists that unity and universality
were never achieved, that Christendom was rent by wars and schisms: but
the special character of the Middle Ages is that this unity was consciously
proposed by Popes and Emperors, not as an ideal, but as a goal, and was as
consciously resisted and, in the end, defeated.

But it is relevant to notice here, that out of two contacts between Rome and
the Teutonic nature was struck, or so it seemed, the spark of Chivalry. A
thousand years before Froissart, Britain was drained of legionaries to reinforce
Stilicho and to back the Imperial pretensions of Magnus Maximus and the
usurper Constantine: and the Saxons came. It is difficult to doubt that, after
four hundred years of Roman influence, such remnant as withstood the invader,
under that historic figure around whom the romances of King Arthur took
their shape, did so, not as Britons deserted by their conquerors, but more
Romano, as the heirs and representatives of Rome: and, were Excalibur
dredged up, we should find it, not the long Medieval sword of legend, but the
leaf-shaped sword of Rome. In later ages, Arthur and his knights became the
very founts of Chivalry, together with those others, Charlemagne and his
Paladins, who fought to re-establish what Arthur, it seemed, had fought in
vain to save. It was to these two figures, their splendour enhanced by centuries
of legend, that Chivalry, in the later acceptation of the term, returned in
conscious imitation.

-2-