ompeers was in full force. The aesthetic reaction, represented on
the Continent by Chateaubriand, Manzoni, and Victor Hugo, and in England
by Walter Scott, Pugin, Ruskin, and above all by Wordsworth, came in
to give strength to this barrier. Under the magic of the men who led in
this reaction, cathedrals and churches, which in the previous century
had been regarded by men of culture as mere barbaric masses of stone and
mortar, to be masked without by classic colonnades and within by rococo
work in stucco and papier mache, became even more beloved than in
the thirteenth century. Even men who were repelled by theological
disputations were fascinated and made devoted reactionists by the newly
revealed beauties of medieval architecture and ritual.(479)

(479) A very curious example of this insensibility among persons of
really high culture is to be found in American literature toward the
end of the eighteenth century. Mrs. Adams, wife of John Adams, afterward
President of the United States, but at that time minister to England,
one of the most gifted women of her time, speaking, in her very
interesting letters from England, of her journey to the seashore, refers
to Canterbury Cathedral, seen from her carriage windows, and which she
evidently did not take the trouble to enter, as "looking like a vast
prison." So, too, about the same time, Thomas Jefferson, the American
plenipotentiary in France, a devoted lover of classical and Renaissance
architecture, giving an account of his journey to Paris, never refers to
any of the beautiful cathedrals or churches upon his route.

The centre and fortress of this vast system, and of the reaction against
the philosophy of the eighteenth century, was the University of Oxford.
Orthodoxy was its vaunt, and a special exponent of its spirit and
object of its admiration was its member of Parliament, Mr. William Ewart
Gladstone, who, having begun his political career by a laboured plea
for the union of church and state, ended it by giving that union what
is likely to be a death-blow. The mob at the circus of Constantinople in
the days of the Byzantine emperors was hardly more wildly orthodox than
the mob of students at this foremost seat of learning of the Anglo-Saxon
race during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The Moslem
students of El Azhar are hardly more intolerant now than these English
students were then. A curious proof of this had been displayed just
before the e