view of religious authority, justly suspect. It influences the
thoughts of those obscure prophetical writers, like Joachim of
Flora, strange dreamers in a world of flowery rhetoric of that
third and final dispensation of a "spirit of freedom," in which law
shall have passed away. Of this spirit Aucassin and Nicolette
contains perhaps the most famous expression: it is the answer
Aucassin gives when he is threatened with the pains of hell, if he
makes Nicolette his mistress. A creature wholly of affection and
the senses, he sees on the way to paradise only a feeble and worn-
out company of aged priests, "clinging day and night to the
chapel altars," barefoot or [26] in patched sandals. With or even
without Nicolette, "his sweet mistress whom he so much loves,"
he, for his part, is ready to start on the way to hell, along with
"the good scholars," as he says, and the actors, and the fine
horsemen dead in battle, and the men of fashion,* and "the fair
courteous ladies who had two or three chevaliers apiece beside
their own true lords," all gay with music, in their gold, and silver,
and beautiful furs--"the vair and the grey."

But in the House Beautiful the saints too have their place; and the
student of the Renaissance has this advantage over the student of
the emancipation of the human mind in the Reformation, or the
French Revolution, that in tracing the footsteps of humanity to
higher levels, he is not beset at every turn by the inflexibilities
and antagonisms of some well-recognised controversy, with
rigidly defined opposites, exhausting the intelligence and limiting
one's sympathies. The opposition of the professional defenders
of a mere system to that more sincere and generous play of the
forces of human mind and character, which I have noted as the
secret of Abelard's struggle, is indeed always powerful. But the