And we see from them very well not merely in what light the Middle Ages regarded the classical stories, but also to what extent the classical stories affected the Middle Ages. This latter point is of the more importance in that even yet the exact bearing and meaning of the Renaissance in this respect is by no means universally comprehended. It may be hoped, if not very certainly trusted, that most educated persons have now got rid of the eighteenth-century notion of mediaeval times as being almost totally ignorant of the classics themselves, a notion which careful reading of Chaucer alone should be quite sufficient to dispel. The fact of course is, that all through the Middle Ages the Latin classics were known, unequally but very fairly in most cases, while the earlier Middle Ages at least were by no means ignorant of Greek. But although there was by no means total ignorance, there was what is to us a scarcely comprehensible want of understanding. To the average mediaeval student, perhaps to any mediaeval student, it seems seldom or never to have occurred that the men of whom he was reading had lived under a dispensation so different from his own in law and in religion, in politics and in philosophy, in literature and in science, that an elaborate process of readjustment was necessary in order to get at anything like a real comprehension of them. Nor was he, as a rule, able--men of transcendent genius being rather rare, amid a more than respectable abundance of men of talent--to take them, as Chaucer did to a great extent, Dante more intensely though less widely, and Shakespeare (but Shakespeare had already felt the Renaissance spirit) fully and perfectly, on the broad ground of humanity, so that anachronisms, and faults of costume, matter not one jot to any one but a pedant or a fool. When he came to something in the story--something in sentiment, manners, religion, what not--which was out of the range of his own experience, he changed it into something within the range of his own experience. When the whole story did not lend itself to the treatment which he wished to apply, he changed it, added to it, left out from it, without the slightest scruple. He had no more difficulty in transforming the disciplined tactic of the Macedonian phalanx into a series of random _chevauchees_ than in adjusting the much more congenial front-fighting of Greeks and Trojans to his own ideas; and it cost him little more to engraft a whole brand-new romantic love-story on the Tale of Troy than to change the historical siege of Gaza into a _Fuerres de Gadres_, of which Aimeri of Narbonne or Raoul de Cambrai would have been the appropriate hero. Sometimes, indeed, he simply confounded Persians and Saracens, just as elsewhere he confounded Saracens and Vikings; and he introduced high priests of heathen divinities as bishops, with the same _sang froid_ with which long afterwards the translators of the Bible founded an order of "dukes" in Edom.