It is possible to love the period known as the Middle Ages, or it is possible to detest it. But you cannot ignore it, nor find it flavourless on the palate, because that period possesses character, "character, that personal quality, that idiosyncrasy which, no doubt, you are the richer for possessing, be it morally bad or good--for it is surely better to have a bad character than none, and if you are a church, better to be like the Badia than the City Temple." Indeed, it is evident that the personal equation must largely determine what any writer's conception of the Middle Ages is. A great modern poet, for instance, loved the Middle Ages because economic conditions pressed less hardly on the poor; because London was small and white and clean; because chivalry afforded opportunity for that decorative treatment of knightly episodes which makes his poetry so attractive. Yet across the Channel, much at the same time, an equally distinguished poet treated of the same period in a book of poems which it is instructive to consider side by side with the work of William Morris, and the Frenchman's verse is lurid with fire and bigotry, and the tale of man's inhumanity to man. And the strange point is that both writers could give chapter and verse for the very different type of story they selected. Again, the religious temperament is apt to look back fondly to the Middle Ages as the "Age of Faith." To such minds mediævalism is a period of easy acquiescence in spiritual authority, a state of health before the world grew sick with our modern disease of doubt. Certainly these centuries produced saints whose arresting examples and haunting words must always be the glory of Christianity, and it is equally certain that the offices and doctrines of the Church entered far more intimately into the lives of the common folk than they do to-day. But side by side with faith there was a "spirit of rebellion and revolt against the moral and religious ideas of the time." It may be found in many strangely different shapes: in the life of Abelard; in the extraordinary spread of witchcraft; and--in its supreme literary expression, perhaps--in a famous passage of "Aucassin and Nicolette." And, to take a third illustration of the same difficulty, were the Middle Ages years of sheer lyric beauty, or rather years of inexpressible ugliness and filth? "If you love the very words 'Middle Age'; if they conjure up to your mind glowing old folios of black letter with gilt and florid initials; crimson and green and blue pages in which slim ladies with spiked head-dresses walk amid sparse flowers and trees like bouquets, or where men-at-arms attack walled cities no bigger than themselves, or long-legged youths with tight waists and frizzed hair kiss girls under apple-trees; or a king is on a dais with gold lilies for his background, minstrels on their knees before him, lovers in the gallery"--well, if you accept all this dainty