"What is the cause of the present widespread homage to St. Francis? It is, of course, far too wide a question to allow the present writer to do more than make a few suggestions. First and foremost, we must ever reckon with the perennial charm of the Saint's personality, which seems to wield an ineffable influence over the hearts of men--drawing and holding those of the most different habits of mind, with a sense of personal sympathy. Perhaps no other man, unless it be St. Paul, ever had such wide reaching, all-embracing sympathy: and it may have been wider than St. Paul's, for we find no evidence in the great apostle of a love for nature and of animals. This exquisite Franciscan spirit, as it is called, which is the very perfume of religion--this spirit at once so humble, so tender, so devout, so akin to 'the good odor of Christ'--passed out into the whole world and has become a permanent source of inspiration. A character at once so exhalted and so purified as St. Francis was sure to keep alive an ideal; and so he does. From this one can easily understand St. Francis' dominance among a small but earnest band of enthusiasts now pointing the world back to the reign of the spirit. It was this same gentle idealism of St. Francis which inspired the art of the Umbrian people; it was this which was translated into the paintings of the greatest artists. No school of painting has ever been penetrated with {262} such pure idealism as the Umbrian; and this inspiration, at once religious and artistic, came from the tomb of the _poverello_ above which Giotto had painted his mystical frescoes. The earnest quasi-religious study of the medieval beginnings of western art has therefore rightly been set down as another cause for some of the latter-day pilgrimages to Assisi. In like manner, the scientific treatment of the Romance literature leads naturally to St. Francis as to the humble upper waters of a mighty stream; at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century is St. Francis, at the end is Dante. It was Matthew Arnold, we believe, who first held up the poor man of Assisi as a literary type--a type as distinct and formal as the author of the _Divine Comedy_. 'Prose,' he says, 'could not easily satisfy the saint's ardent soul, and so he made poetry.' 'It was,' writes Ozanam, 'the first cry of a nascent poetry which has grown and made itself heard through the world.'"