ctual types made up (as the mediaeval symbols of justice are made
up of the visible paraphernalia, robe, scales and sword, for judging and
weighing and punishing) of the impressions left on the mind by all
those buildings, or books, or pictures, or statues, or men, women, and
events. They were not the iniquities of this particular despot nor the
scandalous sayings of that particular humanist, but the general moral
chaos of the Italian fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; not the poem of
Pulci, of Boiardo, of Ariosto in especial, but a vast imaginary poem
made up of them all; not the mediaeval saints of Angelico and the pagan
demi-gods of Michael Angelo, but the two tremendous abstractions: the
spirit of Mediaevalism in art, and the spirit of Antiquity; the interest
in the distressed soul, and the interest in the flourishing body. And,
as my thoughts have gone back to Antiquity and onwards to our own times,
their starting-point has nevertheless been the Tuscan art of the
fifteenth century, their nucleus some notes on busts by Benedetto da
Maiano and portraits by Raphael.

My _dramatis persona_ have been modes of feeling and forms of art. I
have tried to explain the life and character, not of any man or woman,
but of the moral scepticism of Italy, of the tragic spirit of our
Elizabethan dramatists; I have tried to write the biography of the
romance poetry of the Middle Ages, of the realism of the great portrait
painters and sculptors of the Renaissance. But these, my _dramatis
persona,_ are, let me repeat it, abstractions: they exist only in my
mind and in the minds of those who think like myself. Hence, like all
abstractions, they represent the essence of a question, but not its
completeness, its many-sidedness as we may see it in reality. Hence it
is that I have frequently passed over exceptions to the rule which I was
stating, because the explanation of these exceptions would have involved
the formulating of a number of apparently irrelevant propositions; so
that any one who please may accuse me of inexactness; and, to give an
instance, cover the margins of my essay on Mediaeval Love with a whole
list of virtuous love stories of the Middle Ages; or else ferret out of
Raynouard and Von der Hagen a dozen pages of mediaeval poems in praise of
rustic life. These objections will be perfectly correct, and (so far as
my knowledge permitted me) I might have puzzled the reader with them
myself; but it remains none the less certain