The Middle Ages were thus only capable of dividing love from marriage. This is witnessed by the greatest singers of love and by the greatest love stories. Tristan and Isolde in the world of poetry, Abelard and Heloïse in that of reality, are the highest types of the new age, even then dawning, which is finally to bring about the declaration of rights of human emotion as of human thought. These lovers, united in life and death, are the highest testimony of the Middle Ages to that free love which makes its own laws and abolishes all others; to that great love which is the sense of eternity of great souls, in opposition to the ephemeral inclination of small ones. Scholasticism, ever extending introspective psychology; mysticism, ever refining the life of the soul devoted to God, unconsciously pour oil upon the red flame of love as upon the white flame of faith. The _Vita Nuova_ of love breaks out in the fire of poetry, whose most aspiring flame was Dante. It lived on in the souls of the elect among Latin peoples. The Platonism of the Renaissance refined the mediæval conception of love as the most excellent means of bringing to perfection the highest human qualities. And thus was established the right of lovers to independence of the customs of society. It is significant that, at the mediæval Courts of Love as at the courts of the Renaissance and in the contests of wit of the seventeenth century, women are granted not only the same right of sentiment as men but also the same liberty of using their spiritual gifts; for every intensifying of love is connected, openly or otherwise, with the augmentation of woman’s spiritual life and with man’s thus enhanced estimation of the value of her personality. Instead of being to him “the sex,” the means of enjoyment, woman becomes the mistress, when love has come to mean an exclusive desire for one woman, who is only to be won by devoted service. Whenever woman has taken the lead in erotic matters, man’s love has been ennobled. In Shakespeare, we find the whole of the preceding spiritual culture summed up. All his best women are chaste in the same degree as they are devoted, but they are also in the same degree spiritually rich and complete personalities. Therefore they are also leaders through their clear-sightedness and promptness in the moment of action. And although Shakespeare, like every other great poet, formed his women more of the material of dreams than of reality; although the foremost men of the Italian Renaissance probably had more often a Boccaccio’s than a Petrarch’s experience of love; although the age of baroque turned _le Pays du tendre_ into a stiff garden surrounding decorative figures, nevertheless life itself, especially the life of the Latin peoples—as well as their best literature—can always show proud and beautiful examples of loving couples and sacrifices for love, even in that century whose male “philosophers” deprived woman of the lead, when love became “galanterie,” gay and ugly