creatures from them,--as different as moths are
different from caterpillars; and different in a certain broad and vast
sense, which I shall try this evening to explain and prove to
you;--different not merely in this or that result of minor
circumstances,--not as you are different from people who never saw a
locomotive engine, or a Highlander of this century from a Highlander of
1745;--different in a far broader and mightier sense than that; in a
sense so great and clear, that we are enabled to separate all the
Christian nations and tongues of the early time from those of the latter
time, and speak of them in one group as the kingdoms of the Middle Ages.
There is an infinite significance in that term, which I want you to
dwell upon and work out; it is a term which we use in a dim
consciousness of the truth, but without fully penetrating into that of
which we are conscious. I want to deepen and make clear to you this
consciousness that the world has had essentially a Trinity of ages--the
Classical Age, the Middle Age, the Modern Age; each of these embracing
races and individuals of apparently enormous separation in kind, but
united in the spirit of their age,--the Classical Age having its
Egyptians and Ninevites, Greeks and Romans,--the Middle Age having its
Goths and Franks, Lombards and Italians,--the Modern Age having its
French and English, Spaniards and Germans; but all these distinctions
being in each case subordinate to the mightier and broader distinction,
between _Classicalism_, _Mediaevalism_, and _Modernism_.

111. Now our object to-night is indeed only to inquire into a matter of
art; but we cannot do so properly until we consider this art in its
relation to the inner spirit of the age in which it exists; and by doing
so we shall not only arrive at the most just conclusions respecting our
present subject, but we shall obtain the means of arriving at just
conclusions respecting many other things.

Now the division of time which the Pre-Raphaelites have adopted, in
choosing Raphael as the man whose works mark the separation between
Mediaevalism and Modernism, is perfectly accurate. It has been accepted
as such by all their opponents.

You have, then, the three periods: Classicalism, extending to the fall
of the Roman empire; Mediaevalism, extending from that fall to the close
of the fifteenth century; and Modernism thenceforward to our days.

112. And in examining into the spirit of these three epochs, obser