Salisbury, he certainly, as we have seen,[8] was not much of a critic himself; but that popular literature was decaying in his time is a statement which no one who knows the _Chansons de Gestes_ and the Arthurian Legend can accept for one moment; while the documents also quoted _supra_, the _Labyrinthus_, the _Nova Poetria_, and the rest—entirely disprove any “distrust” of letters. ----- Footnote 6: Vol. i. p. 457 _sq._ Footnote 7: Spingarn, _op. cit._, p. 2. On the previous page there is the equally surprising statement that in the Middle Ages “Poetry was disregarded or contemned, or was valued, if at all, for qualities that least belong to it.” What were these “qualities”? Footnote 8: Vol. i. p. 414 _note_ ----- The truth is, with submission to Mr Spingarn, that there never was any such, except from the Puritan-religious side, and that this was by no means specially conspicuous in the Middle Ages. [Sidenote: _Not necessarily anti-mediæval,_] The “Defence of Poesy,” and of literature generally, which animates men so different as Boccaccio and Milton, as Scaliger and Sidney, is no direct revolt against the Middle Ages at all, but, as has been said, a discourse _Pro Domo_, in the first place, against the severer and more obscurantist partisans of Catholicism, who were disposed to dislike men of letters as Reformers, and literature as the instrument of Reformation; secondly, and much more urgently, against the Puritan and Philistine variety of Protestantism itself, which so soon turned against its literary leaders and allies. And the special form which this defence took was in turn mainly conditioned, not by anti-mediæval animus, but in part by the circumstances of the case, in part by the character of the critical weapons which men found in their new arsenal of the Classics.