Thus we see the ceaseless sweep of allegory through men’s minds. They felt and thought and dreamed in allegories; and also spent their dry ingenuity on allegorical constructions. It was reserved for one supreme poet to create, out of this atmosphere, a supreme poem which is as complete an allegory as the _Anticlaudianus_. But the _Divina Commedia_ has also the power of its human realities of actually experienced pain and joy, and hate and love. Compared with it, the _Anticlaudianus_ betrays the vapourings of monk and doctor, imaginative indeed, but thin. The author’s feet were not planted on the earth of human life. But the Middle Ages did not demand that allegory should have its feet planted on the earth, so long as its head nodded high among the clouds--or its sentiments wandered sweetly in fancy’s gardens. In one of these dwelt that lovely Rose, whose _Roman_ once had vogue. In structure the _Roman de la rose_ is an allegory from the beginning of the first part by De Lorris to the very end of that encyclopaedic sequel added by De Meun. The story is well known.[149] One may recall the fact that in De Lorris’s poem and De Meun’s sequel every quality and circumstance of Love’s sentiment and fortunes are figured in allegorical personifications--all the lover’s hopes and fears and the wavering chances of his quest. In this respect the poem is the courtly and romantic counterpart of such a philosophical or religious allegory as the _Anticlaudianus_. Personifications of the arts and sciences, the vices and virtues, current since the time of Prudentius’s _Psychomachia_ and Capella’s _Nuptials of Philology_, were all in the _Anticlaudianus_, while in the _Roman de la rose_ figure their secular and romantic kin: in De Lorris’s part, Love, Fair-Welcome, Danger, Reason, Franchise, Pity, Courtesy, Shame, Fear, Idleness, Jealousy, Wicked-Tongue; then, with De Meun, others besides: Richesse, False-Seeming, Hypocrisy, Nature, and Genius.[150] The figures of the _Roman de la rose_ have diverse antecedents scattered through the entire store of knowledge and classic literature possessed by the Middle Ages; perhaps their immediate source of inspiration was the scheme of courtly love which the mediaeval imagination elaborated and revelled in.[151] The poem of De Lorris was a veritable romantic allegory. De Meun, in his sequel, rather plays with the allegorical form, which he continues; it has become a frame for his stores of learning, his knowledge of the world, his views of life, his wit and satire, and his great literary and poetic gifts. Yet it ends in a regular _Psychomachia_, in which Love’s barons are hard beset by all the foes of Love’s delight, though Love has its will at last. BOOK VI LATINITY AND LAW CHAPTER XXX THE SPELL OF THE CLASSICS I. CLASSICAL READING. II. GRAMMAR. III. THE EFFECT UPON THE MEDIAEVAL MAN; HILDEBERT OF LAVARDIN. I