Only when one
remembers the long night of the religious wars which was just about to
fall on France, just as after Spenser, Puritan as he was, after Carew
and Herrick still more, a night of a similar character was about to fall
on England, does the real reason of this singular idiosyncrasy appear.
The company of the _Heptameron_ are the latest representatives, at first
hand, and with no deliberate purpose of presentment, of the mediaeval
conception of gentlemen and ladies who fleeted the time goldenly. They
are not themselves any longer mediaeval; they have been taught modern
ways; they have a kind of uneasy sense (even though one and another of
themselves may now and then flout the idea) of the importance of other
classes, even of some duty on their own part towards other classes.
Their piety is a very little deliberate, their voluptuous indulgence has
a grain of conscience in it and behind it, which distinguishes it not
less from the frank indulgence of a Greek or a Roman than from the still
franker naivete of purely mediaeval art, from the childlike, almost
paradisiac, innocence of the Belli-cents and Nicolettes and of the
daughter of the great Soldan Hugh in that wonderful serio-comic
_chanson_ of the _Voyage a Constantinople_.
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