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THE MIDDLE AGES.

LAWS AND BUILDINGS.

THE middle ages present a grotesque picture, which seems to be the production of a strong but wild imagination. In antiquity, each nation springs, if we may so express ourselves, from its own stock; a primitive spirit, insinuating itself every where and showing its influence in everything, renders manners and institutions homogeneous. The society of the middle ages was composed of the wrecks of a thousand other societies Roman civilization, nay, paganism itself, had left their vestiges in it; from the christian religion it received its faith and its solemnities; the Gothic, Burgundian, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Norman barbarians retained the customs and character peculiar to their respective races. All kinds of property were intermingled; all kinds of laws were blended, the allodial, the fief, the mortmain, the code, the digest, the

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salic, the gombrette, the visigoth law, the common law; all the forms of liberty and servitude jostled one another; the monarchical liberty of the king, the aristocratic liberty of the noble, the individual liberty of the priest, the collective liberty of parishes, the privileged liberty of towns, of the magistracy, of the guilds and artizans and traders, the representative liberty of the nation, Roman slavery, barbarous villenage, the servitude of the aubaine. Hence, those incoherent spectacles, those usages, which appear contradictory to each other, and which are held together solely by the bond of religion. You would almost take them to be different nations, wholly unconnected with one another, but who have merely agreed to live under one common master and around the same altar.

Even in its external appearance, Europe then presented a much more picturesque and national aspect than it at present exhibits. For buildings, the offspring of our religion and our manners, we have substituted, from affectation of the bastard Roman architecture, such as are neither in harmony with our climate nor appropriate to our wants. The cold and servile spirit of copyism has introduced falsehood into our arts, as the ground-work of Latin literature has destroyed in

our literature the originality of the Frankish genius. It was not thus that the middle ages imitated; the minds of those times also admired the Greeks and the Romans; they sought after and studied their works, but, instead of suffering themselves to be mastered by, they mastered them, moulding them to their will, rendering them French, and heightening their beauty by this metamorphosis, full of creative vigour and independence.

The first christian churches in the West were only temples reversed; the pagan worship was external, the decoration of the temple was external; the christian worship was internal, the decoration of the church was internal. The pillars were transferred from the outside to the inside of the edifice, as in the churches in which the believers held their meetings when they issued from the crypts and catacombs. The proportions of the church surpassed in dimensions those of the temple, because the christian congregation met beneath the roof of the church, whereas, the pagan multitude collected under the peristyle of the temple. But, when the christians became masters, they changed this arrangement, and adorned their buildings also on the side towards the landscape and the sky.

And, in order that the supports of the aërial nave might not be inappropriate to the structure, the chisel had cut them out; nothing was to be seen but flying buttresses, pyramids, pinnacles, and statues.

The ornaments which were not essential parts of the edifice were adapted to its style; the tombs were of Gothic fashion, and the church, which covered them like an immense canopy, seemed to be moulded upon their form. The arts of design shared in this flowery and composite taste: on the walls and on the windows were painted landscapes, scripture subjects, and scenes of national history.

In the castles of the great, coloured armorial bearings, inclosed in lozenges of gold, formed ceilings resembling those of the beautiful palaces of the cinque cento in Italy. Writing itself was drawn, the German hieroglyphic substituted for the rectilinear Roman letters, harmonized with the sepulchral stones. The detached towers which served for lookouts on the heights; the castles embosomed in woods or perched on the tops of rocks, like the eyries of vultures; the pointed and narrow bridges thrown boldly across torrents; the fortified towns which you came to at every step, and the battlements of which

were at once ramparts and ornaments; the chapels, the oratories, the hermitages, placed in the most picturesque spots beside roads and rivers; the towers, the steeples of country churches, the abbeys, the monasteries, the cathedrals, all those edifices of which but a small number now exists, and whose fretwork time has blackened, filled up, or broken, had then the freshness of youth ; they had just issued from the hands of the workman. In the whiteness of their stones the eye lost none of the lightness of their details, of the elegance of their towers, of the variety of their wavings, their carvings, their chisellings, their pinkings, and all the whims of a free and inexhaustible imagination.

In the short space of eighteen years, from 1136 to 1154, not fewer than eleven hundred and fifteen castles were built in England alone.

Christianity raised at the general expence, by means of collections and alms, the cathedrals for the erection of which each state was not wealthy enough to pay separately, and scarcely any of which is finished. In those vast and mysterious edifices were engraved in relief and hollowed out as with a nipping tool, the decorations of the altar, the sacred monograms, the vestures and articles used by the priests. The banners, the

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