ike eyes, ("_oculos columbinos_,") over the wild motions of the
twelfth century, and by the calm might of divine love, guiding the
sceptre of the secular king, and the crosier of the spiritual pontiff
alike? Was that a weak or a dark age, when the strength of mind and the
light of love could triumph so signally over brute force, and that
natural selfishness of public motive which has achieved its cold,
glittering triumphs in the lives of so many modern heroes and heroines--a
Louis, a Frederick, a Catharine, a Napoleon? But indeed here, as
elsewhere, we see that the modern world has fallen altogether into a
practical atheism by the idolatry of mere reason; whereas all true
greatness comes not down from the head, but up from the heart of man. In
which greatness of the heart, the Bernards and the Barbarossas of the
middle ages excelled; and therefore they were better than we.

It is by no means necessary for the admirer of Schlegel to maintain that
all this eulogium of the twelfth century, or this depreciation of the
times we live in, is just and well-merited. Nothing is more cheap than to
praise a pretty village perched far away amid the blue skies, and to rail
at the sharp edges and corners of things that fret against our ribs. Let
it be admitted that there is not a little of artistical decoration, and a
great deal of optical illusion, in the matter; still there is some truth,
some great truth, that lay in comparative neglect till Schlegel brought it
into prominency. This is genuine literary merit; it is that sort of
discovery, so to speak, which makes criticism original. And it was not
merely with the bringing forward of new materials, but by throwing new
lights on the old, that Frederick Schlegel enriched aesthetical science.
If the criticism of the nineteenth century may justly boast of a more
catholic sympathy, of a wider flight, of a more comprehensive view, and
more various feast than that which it superseded, it owes this, with
something that belongs to the spirit of the age generally, chiefly to the
special captainship of Frederick Schlegel. If the grand spirit of
combination and comprehension which distinguishes the "Lectures on Ancient
and Modern Literature," be that quality which mainly distinguishes the so
called Romantic from the Classical school of aesthetics, then let us
profess ourselves Romanticists by all means immediately; for the one seems
to include the other as the genus does the species. The beauty o