the works written on the subject up to this day and much of it is
probably lost never again to be recovered for the instruction and
delight of future ages."

The irreparable shattering of the greatest of these monuments of the
past, occurred in our day. The Cathedral of Rheims, the crowning
perfection of architecture having survived "the ravages of wars, the
brutishness of revolutions, the smug complacency of restoration which
had stripped it of its altars, its shrines and its tombs of unnumbered
kings" was the target for two years of German shell and shrapnel and
today it stands gaunt and scathed in a circle of ruin. But even in its
ruin it shows infinite majesty and if it is left as it is,--and may that
be so--for restoration would only vulgarize its incomparable art, Rheims
will stand as a monument both to the thirteenth century which had made
it the supreme type of the Gothic ideal to raise men's souls to God, and
to the twentieth century against whose materialism it was an offence and
a protest.

The third characteristic of the age of Dante is its chivalry, which
placed woman on the highest pedestal she had ever occupied. In
literature that unique influence is seen in a new and an exalted
conception of love. Love is now coupled with nobility of life. The
troubadours had sung of love as a quality belonging to gentle folk,
meaning by that phrase the nobility, and nobility had been defined by
the Emperor Frederick II, patron of the troubadours, as a combination
of ancestral wealth and fine manners. In the Banquet (bk. IV) Dante
rejects that definition and transfers nobility from the social to the
moral order holding that "nobility exists where virtue dwells."

Love, the flowering of this nobility, may be found in the heart of him