bout as rational as if we were to compare the life
within the womb to the life of intelligent though early childhood.
Awakened to aspirations at once fresh and ancient, the mind of man took
hold of the venerable ideals bequeathed to us by the Greeks as a
precious part of its inheritance, and gave them again to the light,
appropriated but also renewed. The old materials came forth, but not
alone; for the types which human genius had formerly conceived were now
submitted to the transfiguring action of a law from on high. Nature
herself prompted the effort to bring the old patterns of worldly
excellence and greatness--or rather the copies of those patterns still
legible, though depraved, and still rich with living suggestion--into
harmony with that higher Pattern, once seen by the eyes and handled by
the hands of men, and faithfully delineated in the Gospels for the
profit of all generations. The life of our Saviour, in its external
aspect, was that of a teacher. It was in principle a model for all, but
it left space and scope for adaptations to the lay life of Christians in
general, such as those by whom the every-day business of the world is to
be carried on. It remained for man to make his best endeavour to exhibit
the great model on its terrestrial side, in its contact with the world.
Here is the true source of that new and noble cycle which the middle
ages have handed down to us in duality of form, but with a nearly
identical substance, under the royal sceptres of Arthur in England and
of Charlemagne in France.

Of the two great systems of Romance, one has Lancelot, the other has
Orlando for its culminating point; these heroes being exhibited as the
respective specimens in whose characters the fullest development of man,
such as he was then conceived, was to be recognised. The one put forward
Arthur for the visible head of Christendom, signifying and asserting its
social unity; the other had Charlemagne. Each arrays about the Sovereign
a fellowship of knights. In them Valour is the servant of Honour; in an
age of which violence is the besetting danger, the protection of the
weak is elevated into a first principle of action; and they betoken an
order of things in which Force should be only known as allied with
Virtue, while they historically foreshadow the magnificent aristocracy
of mediaeval Europe. The one had Guinevere for the rarest gem of beauty,
the other had Angelica. Each of them contained figures of approximati