of devotion, animal fables, courtly or popular allegories and love songs
of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Nor was there
any knowledge or care about the masterpieces of medieval literature in
other languages than English; about such representative works as the
"Nibelungenlied," the "Chanson de Roland," the "Roman de la Rose," the
"Parzival" of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the "Tristan" of Gottfried of
Strasburg, the "Arme Heinrich" of Harmann von Aue, the chronicles of
Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissart, the "Morte Artus," the "Dies
Irae," the lyrics of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadour, and of the
minnesinger Walter von der Vogelweide, the Spanish Romancero, the poems
of the Elder Edda, the romances of "Amis et Amile" and "Aucassin et
Nicolete," the writings of Villon, the "De Imitatione Christi" ascribed
to Thomas à Kempis. Dante was a great name and fame, but he was virtually
unread.

There is nothing strange about this; many of these things were still in
manuscript and in unknown tongues, Old Norse, Old French, Middle High
German, Middle English, Mediaeval Latin. It would be hazardous to assert
that the general reader, or even the educated reader, of to-day has much
more acquaintance with them at first hand than his ancestor of the
eighteenth century; or much more acquaintance than he has with
Aeschuylus, Thucydides, and Lucretius, at first hand. But it may be
confidently asserted that he knows much more _about_ them; that he thinks
them worth knowing about; and that through modern, popular versions of
them--through poems, historical romances, literary histories, essays and
what not--he has in his mind's eye a picture of the Middle Age, perhaps
as definite and fascinating as the picture of classical antiquity. That
he has so is owing to the romantic movement. For the significant
circumstance about the attitude of the last century toward the whole
medieval period was, not its ignorance, but its incuriosity. It did not