given, is
little else than a record or the steps by which, one after another, new
features of that vast and complicated scheme of things which we loosely
call the Middle Ages were brought to light and made available as literary
material. The picture was constantly having fresh details added to it,
nor is there any reason to believe that it is finished yet. Some of the
finest pieces of mediaeval work have only within the last few years been
brought to the attention of the general reader; _e.g._, the charming old
French story in prose and verse, "Aucassin et Nicolete," and the
fourteenth-century English poem, "The Perle." The future holds still
other phases of romanticism in reserve; the Middle Age seems likely to be
as inexhaustible in novel sources of inspiration as classical antiquity
has already proved to be. The past belongs to the poet no less than the
present, and a great part of the literature of every generation will
always be retrospective. The tastes and preferences of the individual
artist will continue to find a wide field for selection in the rich
quarry of Christian and feudal Europe.

It is not a little odd that the book which first aroused, in modern
Europe, an interest in Norse mythology should have been written by a
Frenchman. This was the "Introduction a l'Histoire de Dannemarc,"
published in 1755 by Paul Henri Mallet, a native of Geneva and sometime
professor of Belles Lettres in the Royal University at Copenhagen. The
work included also a translation of the first part of the Younger Edda,
with an abstract of the second part and of the Elder Edda, and versions
of several Runic poems. It was translated into English, in 1770, by
Thomas Percy, the editor of the "Reliques," under the title, "Northern
Antiquities; or a Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion, and Laws
of the ancient Danes." A German translation had appeared a few years
earlier and had inspired the Schleswig-Holsteiner, Heinrich Wilhem von
Gerstenberg, to compose his "Gedicht eines Skalden," which introduced the
old Icelandic mythology into German poetry in 1766. Percy had published
independently in 1763 "Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, translated from the
Icelandic Language."

Gray did not wait for the English translation of Mallet's book. In a
letter to Mason, dated in 1758, and inclosing some criticisims on the
latter's "Caractacus" (then in MS.), he wrote, "I am pleased with the
Gothic Elysium. Do you think I am ignoran