fully believed, a Book of Life; and every man of real genius took up
his function of illustrating the scheme of human morality and
salvation, as naturally, and faithfully, as an English mother of to-day
giving her children their first lessons in the Bible. In this endeavour
to teach they almost unawares taught themselves; the question "How
shall I represent this most clearly?" became to themselves, presently,
"How was this most likely to have happened?" and habits of fresh and
accurate thought thus quickly enlivened the formalities of the Greek
pictorial theology; formalities themselves beneficent, because
restraining by their severity and mystery the wantonness of the newer
life. Foolish modern critics have seen nothing in the Byzantine school
but a barbarism to be conquered and forgotten. But that school brought
to the art-scholars of the thirteenth century, laws which had been
serviceable to Phidias, and symbols which had been beautiful to Homer:
and methods and habits of pictorial scholarship which gave a refinement
of manner to the work of the simplest craftsman, and became an
education to the higher artists which no discipline of literature can
now bestow, developed themselves in the effort to decipher, and the
impulse to re-interpret, the Eleusinian divinity of Byzantine
tradition.

88. The words I have just used, "pictorial scholarship," and "pictorial
theology," remind me how strange it must appear to you that in this
sketch of the intellectual state of Italy in the thirteenth century I
have taken no note of literature itself, nor of the fine art of Music
with which it was associated in minstrelsy. The corruption of the
meaning of the word "clerk," from "a chosen person" to "a learned one,"
partly indicates the position of literature in the war between the
golden crest and scarlet cap; but in the higher ranks, literature and
music became the grace of the noble's life, or the occupation of the