rough the minne-singers, through the lay
inventors, or rather importers, of pointed architecture, through the
German school of painting, through the politics of the free towns,
till it attained complete freedom in Luther and his associate
reformers.

For my fantastic quotations of Scripture, if they shall be deemed
irreverent, I can only say, that they were the fashion of the time,
from prince to peasant--that there is scarcely one of them with
which I have not actually met in the writings of the period--that
those writings abound with misuse of Scripture, far more coarse,
arbitrary, and ridiculous, than any which I have dared to insert--
that I had no right to omit so radical a characteristic of the
Middle Age.

For the more coarse and homely passages with which the drama is
interspersed, I must make the same apology. I put them there
because they were there--because the Middle Age was, in the gross, a
coarse, barbarous, and profligate age--because it was necessary, in
order to bring out fairly the beauty of the central character, to
show 'the crooked and perverse generation' in which she was 'a child
of God without rebuke.' It was, in fact, the very ferocity and
foulness of the time which, by a natural revulsion, called forth at
the same time the Apostolic holiness and the Manichean asceticism of
the Mediaeval Saints. The world was so bad that, to be Saints at
all, they were compelled to go out of the world. It was necessary,
moreover, in depicting the poor man's patroness, to show the
material on which she worked; and those who know the poor, know also
that we can no more judge truly of their characters in the presence
of their benefactors, than we can tell by seeing clay in the
potter's hands what it was in its native pit. These scenes have,
therefore, been laid principally in Elizabeth's absence, in order to
preserve their only use and meaning.

So rough and common a life-picture of the Middle Age will, I am
afraid, whether faithful or not, be far from acceptable to those who
take their notions of that period principally from such exquisite
dreams as the fictions of Fouque, and of certain moderns whose
graceful minds, like some enchanted well,

In whose calm depths the pure and beautiful
Alone are mirrored,

are, on account of their very sweetness and simplicity, singularly
unfitted to convey any true likeness of the coarse and stormy Middle
Age. I have been already accused, by others than Romanis