It was at Assisi that Cimabue and Giotto received their
most sublime inspiration and did their very best, breathing the air
that St. Francis himself had breathed and listening day by day to
traditions and memories of the saint, told peradventure by one or
another who had seen him alive or even touched his garments in their
childhood. It may even be that there Dante watched Giotto at his work
while the painter got the poet's face by heart.
* * * * * * *
To write the history of the Mendicant Orders in England would be a
task beyond my capacity, but no man can hope to understand the
successes or the failures of any great party in Church or State until
he has arrived at some comprehension, not only of the objects which
it set itself to achieve, but of its _modus operandi_ at the
outset of its career.
The Friars were a great party in the Church, organized with a
definite object, and pledged to carry out that object in simple
reliance upon what we now call the _Voluntary Principle_. St.
Francis saw, and saw much more clearly than even we of the nineteenth
century see it, that the Parochial system is admirable, is a perfect
system for the village, that it is unsuited for the town, that in the
towns the attempt to work it had ended in a miserable and scandalous
failure.
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