_English Poets_), shows that he has been reading some old French authors. He does not begin with old French when he is young; evidently he was brought to it in working back from the better known poets, Dante and Chaucer. Ruskin’s old French quotations are also rather late in the series of his writings; it was in his Oxford lectures, partly published in _Fors Clavigera_, that he dealt with _The Romance of the Rose_, and used it to illustrate whatever else was in his mind at the time. Thus it is obvious that any one who sets out to write about English literature in the Middle Ages will find himself addressing an audience which is not at all in agreement with regard to the subject. Some will probably be historical in their tastes, and will seek, in literature, for information about manners and customs, fashions of opinion, ‘typical developments’ in the history of culture or education. Others may be on the look-out for stories, for the charm of romance which is sometimes thought to belong peculiarly to the Middle Ages, and some, with ambitions of their own, may ask for themes that can be used and adapted in modern forms, as the Nibelung story has been used by Wagner and William Morris and many others; perhaps for mere suggestions of plots and scenery, to be employed more freely, as in Morris’s prose romances, for example. Others, starting from one favourite author—Dante or Chaucer or Malory—will try to place what they already know in its right relation to all its surroundings—by working, for instance, at the history of religious poetry, or the different kinds of story-telling. It is not easy to write for all these and for other different tastes as well. But it is not a hopeless business, so long as there is some sort of interest to begin with, even if it be only a general vague curiosity about an unknown subject. There are many prejudices against the Middle Ages; the name itself was originally an expression of contempt; it means the interval of darkness between the ruin of ancient classical culture and the modern revival of learning—a time supposed to be full of ignorance, superstition and bad taste, an object of loathing to well-educated persons. As an example of this sort of opinion about the Middle Ages, one may take what Bentham says of our ‘barbarian ancestors’—‘few of whom could so much as read, and those few had nothing before them that was worth the reading’. ‘When from their ordinary occupation, their order of the day, the cutting of one another’s throats, or those of Welshmen, Scotchmen or Irishmen, they could steal now and then a holiday, how did they employ it? In cutting Frenchmen’s throats in order to get their money: this was active virtue:—leaving Frenchmen’s throats uncut was indolence, slumber, inglorious ease.’