which fill us with a sort of pious respect for our ancestors when we
see their portraits from the Middle Ages. Lean faces, too, with
burning, sunken eyes, under bald heads yellow from the labors of
futile scholasticism, contrasted with young and eager countenances,
grave faces, warlike faces, and the ruddy cheeks of the financial
class.

These lectures, dissertations, theses, sustained by the brightest
geniuses of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, roused our
forefathers to enthusiasm. They were to them their bull-fights, their
Italian opera, their tragedy, their dancers; in short, all their
drama. The performance of Mysteries was a later thing than these
spiritual disputations, to which, perhaps, we owe the French stage.
Inspired eloquence, combining the attractions of the human voice
skilfully used, with daring inquisition into the secrets of God,
sufficed to satisfy every form of curiosity, appealed to the soul, and
constituted the fashionable entertainment of the time. Not only did
Theology include the other sciences, it was science itself, as grammar
was science to the Ancient Greeks; and those who distinguished
themselves in these duels, in which the orators, like Jacob, wrestled
with the Spirit of God, had a promising future before them. Embassies,
arbitrations between sovereigns, chancellorships, and ecclesiastical
dignities were the meed of men whose rhetoric had been schooled in
theological controversy. The professor's chair was the tribune of the
period.

This system lasted till the day when Rabelais gibbeted dialectics by
his merciless satire, as Cervantes demolished chivalry by a narrative
comedy.