Meanwhile such giants as Alexander Hales and Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus among the Minorites--all Englishmen be it remembered--and Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus among the Dominicans, had given to intellectual life that amazing lift into a higher region of thought, speculation, and inquiry which prepared the way for greater things by-and-by. It was at Assisi that Cimabue and Giotto received their most sublime inspiration and did their very best, breathing the air that St. Francis himself had breathed and listening day by day to traditions and memories of the saint, told peradventure by one or another who had seen him alive or even touched his garments in their childhood. It may even be that there Dante watched Giotto at his work while the painter got the poet's face by heart. * * * * * * * To write the history of the Mendicant Orders in England would be a task beyond my capacity, but no man can hope to understand the successes or the failures of any great party in Church or State until he has arrived at some comprehension, not only of the objects which it set itself to achieve, but of its _modus operandi_ at the outset of its career. The Friars were a great party in the Church, organized with a definite object, and pledged to carry out that object in simple reliance upon what we now call the _Voluntary Principle_. St. Francis saw, and saw much more clearly than even we of the nineteenth century see it, that the Parochial system is admirable, is a perfect system for the village, that it is unsuited for the town, that in the towns the attempt to work it had ended in a miserable and scandalous failure. The Friars came as helpers of the poor town clergy, just when those clergy had begun to give up their task as hopeless. They came as missionaries to those whom the town clergy had got to regard as mere _pariahs_. They came to strengthen the weak hands, and to labour in a new field. _St. Francis was the John Wesley of the thirteenth century, whom the Church did not cast out_.