r it, too abstruse. He had accepted
frankly the dogmatic limits of the Church, and thrown himself with even
enthusiastic faith into her reasonings, at once so bold and so
undoubting--her spirit of certainty, and her deep contemplations on the
unseen and infinite. And in literature, he had taken as guides and
models, above all criticism and all appeal, the classical writers. But
with his mind full of the deep and intricate questions of metaphysics
and theology, and his poetical taste always owing allegiance to Vergil,
Ovid, and Statius--keen and subtle as a schoolman--as much an idolater
of old heathen art and grandeur as the men of the Renaissance--his eye
is yet as open to the delicacies of character, to the variety of
external nature, to the wonders of the physical world--his interest in
them as diversified and fresh, his impressions as sharp and distinct,
his rendering of them as free and true and forcible, as little weakened
or confused by imitation or by conventional words, his language as
elastic and as completely under his command, his choice of poetic
materials as unrestricted and original, as if he had been born in days
which claim as their own such freedom and such keen discriminative sense
of what is real in feeling and image--as if he had never felt the
attractions of a crabbed problem of scholastic logic, or bowed before
the mellow grace of the Latins. It may be said, indeed, that the time
was not yet come when the classics could be really understood and
appreciated; and this is true, perhaps fortunate. But admiring them with
a kind of devotion, and showing not seldom that he had caught their
spirit, he never attempts to copy them. His poetry in form and material
is all his own. He asserted the poet's claim to borrow from all science,
and from every phase of nature, the associations and images which he
wants; and he showed that those images and associations did not lose
their poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality.

THIRD ESTATE JOINS IN THE GOVERNMENT
OF FRANCE

A.D. 1302

HENRI MARTIN[44]

At the commencement of the fourteenth century, when the
power of Philip IV of France (surnamed the "Fair") was at
its height, contentions arose between him and Pope Boniface
VIII over the taxation of the clergy, and the right of
nomination to vacant bishoprics and benefices within the
dominions of the French King.

Affairs reached a crisis when Philip laid claim to the
co