136 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

knowing art than that of the thirteenth century,-it is altogether another art. Between the two there is a great gulf, a distinction for ever ineffaceable. The change from one to the other was not that of the child into the man, as we usually consider it, it was that of the chrysalis into the butterfly. There was an entire change in the habits, food, method of existence, and heart of the whole creature. That we know more than thirteenth-century people is perfectly true; but that is not the essential difference between us and them. We are different kind of creatures from them,-as different as moths are different from caterpillars; and different in a certain broad and vast sense, which I shall try this evening to explain and prove to you;-different not merely in this or that result of minor circumstances,-not as you are different from people who never saw a locomotive engine, or a Highlander of this century from a Highlander of 1745;-different in a far broader and mightier sense than that; in a sense so great and clear, that we are enabled to separate all the Christian nations and tongues of the early time from those of the latter time, and speak of them in one group as the kingdoms of the Middle Ages. There is an infinite significance in that term, which I want you to dwell upon and work out; it is a term which we use in a dim consciousness of the truth, but without fully penetrating into that of which we are conscious. I want to deepen and make clear to you this consciousness that the world has had essentially a Trinity of ages-the Classical Age, the Middle Age, the Modern Age; each of these embracing races and individuals of apparently enormous separation in kind, but united in the spirit of their age,-the Classical Age having its Egyptians and Ninevites, Greeks and Romans,-the Middle Age having its Goths and Franks, Lombards and Italians,-the Modern Age having its French and English, Spaniards and Germans; but all these distinctions being in each case subordinate to the mightier and broader distinction, between Classicalism, Mediœvalism, and Modernism.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]