icken
ruffian, or as the vulgar, fat upstart of Spanish comedy, returns
without honour or shame, holding money (and next to money, negroes) of
greater account than any insignia of paladinship or the Round Table; it
is brutal, vulgar, cynical; at best very sad, and it gets written for
its delectation the comic-tragic novels of rapscallions, panders,
prostitutes, and card-sharpers, which from "Lazarillo de Tormes" to "Gil
Blas," and from "Gil Blas" to "Tom Jones," finally replace the romances
of the Launcelots, Galahads, Rinaldos, and Orlandos.

Thus did the mediaeval romantic-epic stuffs suffer alteration,
adulteration, and loss of character, throughout the long period of the
Middle Ages, without ever receiving an artistic shape, such as should
make all men preserve and cherish them for the only thing which makes
men preserve and cherish such things--that never to be wasted quality,
beauty. The Middle Ages were powerless to endow therewith their own
subjects; so the subjects had to wait, altering more and more with every
passing day, till the coming of the Renaissance. And by that time these
subjects had ceased to have any serious meaning whatever; the Roland of
the song of Roncevaux had become the crazy Orlando of Ariosto; the
Renaud of "The Quatre Fils Aymon," had become the Rinaldo, thrashed with
sheaves of lilies by Cupid, of Matteo Boiardo. The Renaissance took up
the old epic-romantic materials and made out of them works of art; but
works of art which, as I said before, were playthings gets written for
its delectation the comic-tragic novels of rapscallions, panders,
prostitutes, and card-sharpers, which, from "Lazarillo de Tormes" to
"Gil Bias," and from "Gil Bias" to "Tom Jones," finally replace the
romances of the Launcelots, Galahads, Rinaldos, and Orlandos.

* * * * *

MEDIEVAL LOVE.

On laying down the "Vita Nuova" our soul is at first filled and
resounding with the love of Beatrice. Whatever habits or capacities of
noble loving may lurk within ourselves, have been awakened by the solemn
music of this book, and have sung in unison with Dante's love till we
have ceased to hear the voice of his passion and have heard only the
voice of our own. When the excitement has diminished, when we have grown
able to separate from our own feelings the feelings of the man dead
these five centuries and a half, and to realize the strangeness, the
obsoleteness of this love which f