The exposition also must perforce follow the above character of an object, which is received rather than given. It can only be a wandering through a world that is for ever determined; which, although it is discovered, organized, and peopled with the freedom of the imagination wherewith Hesiod and Homer created their gods, nevertheless undertakes to give us a picture and a report of what has actually happened, an account full of energetic movement, yet plastic in the rigidity of its pains; rich in the flashes of its horror, yet mitigated pitifully in Hell through Dante's own sympathy; more gracious in purgatory, but none the less fully and completely elaborated; and, finally, translucent as light in Paradise, and for ever without materia form in the eternal ether of thought. The ancient world no doubt peers into this world of the Catholic poet, but only as the guiding star and companion of human wisdom and culture; for, where it is a question of doctrine and dogma, it is the scholasticism of Christian theology and love which speaks. (_γγ_) A _third_ fundamental subject-matter, which arrests the interest of the poetry of the Middle Ages, is that of _chivalry._ This interest is not merely limited to its worldly and romantic association with love-adventure and tilting matches, but is occupied with religious objects in virtue of the mysticism of Christian knighthood. The actions and events of such compositions have no relation to national interests; they are matters effected by individuals, which only concern the personal agent as such; they are generally similar to what I have described in my previous reference to romantic chivalry. Individuals are consequently placed in a position of complete freedom and independence. A novel form of heroism is thereby created within a social environment that is not as yet stereotyped to the prosaic mode and temper; a heroism, however, which, on account of interests which in part are due to religious phantasy, and in part--that is from the worldly point of view--are wholly personal and imaginary, eschews that substantive Real, upon the basis of which the Greek heroes are united, or as units contend, are victorious or are vanquished. Despite all the varied epic compositions, which such a course as the above occasions, the adventurous character of the situations, conflicts and plots rather tends, on the one hand, in the direction of a treatment usually met with in romances, where the various examples of adventure are loosely interwoven in no more stringent bond of unity, and on the other to that which, while sharing the general features of such works, is not evolved on the background of a consistently organized civic order and a truly prosaic condition of general life. Moreover the imagination is not content with the mere invention of knightly characters and adventures outside the pale of the ordinary world of things; it furthermore associates the exploits of the same with important legendary centres of