We may take him then as our standard with regard to this completeness of being, our criterion, by which other men and other ages are to be judged. As has been said before, his excellence in the several parts of his nature is remarkable; but that is not what engages our attention now, but the fact of his full and proportionate development of the whole; nothing was omitted, nothing was developed at the expense of the rest. THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE RENAISSANCE We turn the page then to the Middle Ages and again find ourselves in surroundings of loveliness. It would be interesting to enter equally fully into the nature of the mediaeval epoch, but in a single lecture a comparatively hasty survey must suffice. We approach the mediaeval city and once more are struck by the beauty of the thing. It rises, with its towers and gateways, like a jewel set in the surrounding landscape, clearly defined in its artistic and organic unity by its circumscribing walls. There are no acres and acres of soul-destroying suburbs. We approach through one of the beautiful gates, perhaps over one one of those delightful old bridges with its exquisite little bridge chapel, and find ourself in a city of romance, a very fairyland of wonder. Above all towers the glorious cathedral, the centre of the religious life, and to balance it some mighty castle, the centre of the secular authority. On every hand are beautiful chantry chapels, elegant well heads, fascinating niches, charming arch ways over the street or market crosses. Here are the splendid gild-halls with their sculpture and carving, their colour and gilding, their tapestry and glass, their woodwork and iron work; there are the cloisters of some abbey, the hall of some college or the attractive houses of the citizens. And just as was the case in Greece, when we enter the buildings we find the same loving care in the beauty of every detail, the locks, the handles, the hinges and the furniture marked by a certain sparing simplicity such as we found in Greece or might find in Japan to-day. Even the gutter-pipes and things of baser use are all made beautiful. The extraordinary beauty of the crafts of the Middle Ages is by no means so generally realized as it should be. Nothing has ever approached the forged iron-work of the earlier period or the chisel and file-work of the later. The work in precious metals rivals everything except the unapproachably chaste designs of the Keltic artists; and although but a mere battered fragment of mediaeval woodwork remains, something of its extreme beauty must be more or less familiar to everyone. Probably the best needlework that the world has ever seen was the famous English work of the thir |