Perhaps it may not be amiss to follow up those former articles with a complementary study of the Poet—no longer as the inspirer of nineteenth and twentieth century ideals, but as the supreme representative of the thought and feeling of his own century, the thirteenth. Like Shakespeare, Dante never grows old. There is a quality of universality about his genius, and a broad and deep human appeal in his writing which renders it the proper heritage of every generation. And, haughty and aloof as was his spirit during life, with an aloofness intensified by bitter exile and by the sickness of ever-deferred hope, he was not one of those great ones who are entirely out of touch with their contemporaries, living in an age not yet born. Scarcely had he passed from mortal sight when a chorus of appreciation made itself heard, which, though it has waned in ages of waning taste, has never ceased to sound. In a very true sense, Dante sums up in himself all that is best in mediaeval thought. So Mr. Henry Osborne Taylor, in his formidable study of _The Mediaeval Mind_, significantly heads the forty-third and last chapter “The Mediaeval Synthesis: Dante.” “There is unity,” he affirms, “throughout the diversity of mediaeval life; and Dante is the proof of it.”[163] It is pre-eminently as a religious thinker that Dante holds this place, and supplies this synthesis. Theology as conceived in the thirteenth century was not only the “Queen of Sciences”; the religious conception of knowledge embraced and included all else. To Dante, the theologian-poet, as to Thomas Aquinas, the theologian-philosopher, all knowledge whatsoever was ultimately _one_; its end and purpose, its ground and justification, its key and explanation were to be found in the mystery of the Blessed Trinity-in-Unity. Theology was not one among many departments of knowledge; it was the sum of knowledge, the key to all problems of the universe. Some of us retain, deep down in our nature, a conviction that, in this point at least, the scholastic theologians were right. While thankfully accepting the results of the scientific “division of labour,” the marvellous practical and theoretical fruits of a free and systematic investigation of phenomena which have transformed our very conception of knowledge and the knowable, we are apt to feel sometimes that the thirteenth century thinkers, with their complete mastery and mapping-out of the comparatively narrow field of the “scibile,” were not so liable as ourselves to lose sight of the wood by reason of the multitude of the trees, to lose the idea of an universe in the absorbing interest of its details.