circumstance, you get sheer lyric beauty, and nothing else. Only there is another side, a side not very pleasant to dwell upon, and it may perhaps be hinted at by saying that such a necessary of the toilet as a pocket-handkerchief was not generally known in this Age of Beauty. Perhaps it would be truer to hold that the Middle Ages comprised all these things--the knight-errant and the tormentor; the altar and the witch's Sabbath; a dream of loveliness having its roots in slime and squalor. These centuries were both "enormous and delicate." They were great enough to include opposites, and to square the circle. You may love them, or you may hate them; but they cannot be given the go-by. The philosophy of the Middle Ages--that is to say, the idea which governed their political and theological conceptions--was both simple and profound. The Emperor or King was considered to be the guardian of the temporal order of things, just as the Pope was held to be the supreme authority in matters of eternal and spiritual concern. It was an idea fascinating in its simplicity, but life is a tangled and complex matter, and in practice, planets, which in theory moved strictly in their own orbits, were continually striking across each other's path. Even St. Louis, the King, who carried saintliness to the extreme limit permitted to man, was involved in frequent political quarrels with the supreme head of his Church, and by one of the little ironies of fate came within measurable distance of excommunication. The King--again in theory--was the owner of all his realm. This was necessary to abolish Heptarchies. But for the support of the Crown he parcelled out his realm amongst great lords, and thus established Heptarchies again. The great barons, in their turn, divided their estates amongst knights, bound to assist them in their quarrels, and to furnish a certain number of soldiers to their service. Amongst these knights sprang up one of the supreme institutions of the Middle Ages--the institution of chivalry. "It took its birth in the interior of the feudal mansions, without any set purpose beyond that of declaring, first, the admission of the young man to the rank and occupation of the warrior; secondly, the tie which bound him to his feudal superior--his lord, who conferred upon him the arms of knighthood. But when once the feudal society had acquired some degree of stability and confidence, the usages, the feelings, the circumstances of every kind which attended the young man's admission among the vassal warriors, came under two influences, which soon gave them a fresh direction, and impressed them with a novel character. Religion and imagination, poetry and the Church, laid hold on chivalry, and used it as a powerful means of attaining the objects they had in view, of meeting the moral wants which it was their business to provide for." Throughout a long apprenticeship, in a castle which contained practically but one woman, the wife of his lord and she removed how