It is only too true that the Middle Ages, from which Donatello’s generation was emerging, were a period of spiritual gloom and depression. But this was due not to the larger troubles and experiences of men, but to the spiritual tyranny of the Church, which had distorted the sweetness and benevolence of the Gospel of Christ to include a hideous engine of torture. The clearest picture of this odious manufacture of artificial horrors may be seen not only in the many grotesque representations of the tortures of hell, which were anything but grotesque to the public of the Middle Ages, but by attending a mediæval play, which has been brought out in Boston, as well as in London--the play called _Everyman_, which magnifies the horrors of death by representing the Deity as a gloomy tyrant, served by a greedy and heartless Church, which exacts half a man’s fortune for the boon of saving him from eternal torments. These artificial horrors were not indeed unknown to the Greeks, for we hear that the punishments of the wicked, not to speak of Tantalus, Ixion, and the rest, formed part of the revelations of the Eleusinian Mysteries, but they would on no account have been permitted a place in ordinary life or in art. If the Attic public fined the poet Phrynichus 10,000 drachmas for bringing before them their national sorrows in his _Fall of Miletus_, what would they not have fined the author of _Everyman_, for importing darkness and horror into the day of death and libelling the gods as cruel tyrants with no mercy for the frailties of men? But, apart from this imported gloom, it is in my opinion false to say that the Greek was not just as experienced as any modern man in the great problems and the inevitable sorrows of human life. The whole of Greek tragedy consists in the representation of these dolours, and if Professor Villari wants proofs that the terrors of conscience, the agonies of remorse, were perfectly known to the Greeks, I ask him to turn to the picture of the tyrant’s soul in the eighth book of Plato’s _Republic_ or to Xenophon’s _Hiero_. The Greeks were not at all that simple, joyous, spontaneous set of grownup children who appear in many of our books upon the subject. They had a large and varied experience of life.[25] But they had the good sense--or shall I say the genius?--to confine their art to what it ought to convey. They felt that marble and bronze should not be used to represent the violent emotions of tragedy, the violent moments in human life, and when they lost this reserve, their sculpture had begun its decadence. The _Laocoon_ with the two little men representing his children is indeed a work of art of which a modern sculptor might well be proud. It would not have been approved by the Greeks of the Golden Age, and Phidias would have looked upon the group with contempt, in spite of its technical excellence.