when the Middle Ages had been dead two hundred years.

The light which the researches of modern historians, archaeologists,
bibliographers, and others, have let in on our view of the Middle Ages
has dispersed the cloud of ignorance on this subject which was one of
the natural defects of the qualities of the learned men and keen
critics of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries.
The Middle-class or Whig theory of life is failing us in all branches
of human intelligence. Ethics, Politics, Art, and Literature are more
than beginning to be regarded from a wider point of view than that
from which our fathers and grandfathers could see them.

For many years there has been a growing reaction against the dull
"grey" narrowness of the eighteenth century, which looked on Europe
during the last thousand years as but a riotous, hopeless, and stupid
prison. It is true that it was on the side of Art alone that this
enlightenment began, and that even on that side it progressed slowly
enough at first--_e.g._ Sir Walter Scott feels himself obliged,
as in the _Antiquary_, to apologize to pedantry for his
instinctive love of Gothic architecture. And no less true is it that
follies enough were mingled with the really useful and healthful birth
of romanticism in Art and Literature. But at last the study of facts
by men who were neither artistic nor sentimental came to the help of
that first glimmer of instinct, and gradually something like a true
insight into the life of the Middle Ages was gained; and we see that
the world of Europe was no more running round in a circle then than
now, but was developing, sometimes with stupendous speed, into
something as different from itself as the age which succeeds this will
be different from that wherein we live. The men of those times are no
longer puzzles to us; we can understand their aspirations, and