Page:Petrach, the first modern scholar and man of letters.djvu/26

classics of Rome, and nothing had taken their place. Treatises were written in great numbers, but relatively little that can be called literature in the higher sense of the word was produced, even in the thirteenth century, except the often elaborate but evanescent poems and romances in the vernacular. To-day we can acquaint ourselves with much of the best that has been thought and said in the world without going back to the masterpieces of antiquity. Each nation of Europe now has its national literature, its Shakespeare, its Dante, its Goethe, or its Voltaire, with a noble company of lesser writers, to cherish and augment the literary heritage of the Occident. But the Middle Ages enjoyed no such advantage. When, therefore, men tired of logic and theology, they turned back with single-hearted enthusiasm to the age of Augustus, and, in so doing, they took a great step forward, for the valuable thing in literature, to quote Arnold once more, is "the judgment which forms itself insensibly in a fair mind along with fresh knowledge … this judgment comes almost of itself; and what it displaces it displaces easily and naturally, and without any turmoil of controversial reasonings. The thing comes to look differently to us, as we look at it by the light of fresh know-