Different sides of this spirit display themselves, of course, in different productions of the time. There is the spirit of combat, in which the _Chansons de geste_ show the way, anticipating in time, if not quite equalling in intensity, the Sagas and the _Nibelungenlied_. There is sometimes faintly mingled with this (as in the _gabz_ of the _Voyage a Constantinoble_, and the exploits of Rainoart with the _tinel_) the spirit, half rough, half sly, of jesting, which by-and-by takes shape in the _fabliaux_. There is the immense and restless spirit of curiosity, which explores and refashions, to its own guise and fancy, the relics of the old world, the treasures of the East, the lessons of Scripture itself. Side by side with these there is that singular form of the religious spirit which has been so constantly misunderstood, and which, except in a very few persons, seems so rare nowadays--the faith which is implicit without being imbecile, childlike without being childish, devout with a fearless familiarity, the spirit to which the _Dies Irae_ and the sermons of St Francis were equally natural expressions, and which, if it could sometimes exasperate itself into the practices of the Inquisition, found a far commoner and more genuine expression in the kindly humanities of the _Ancren Riwle_. There is no lack of knowledge and none of inquiry; though in embarking on the enormous ocean of ignorance, it is inquiry not cabined and cribbed by our limits. In particular, there is an almost unparalleled, a certainly unsurpassed, activity in metaphysical speculation, a fence-play of thought astonishing in its accuracy and style. As Poetry slowly disintegrates and exfoliates itself into Prose, literary gifts for which verse was unsuited develop themselves in the vernaculars; and the chronicle--itself so lately an epic--becomes a history, or at least a memoir; the orator, sacred or profane, quits the school rhetoric and its familiar Latin vehicle for more direct means of persuasion; the jurist gives these vernaculars precision by adopting them.