do anything with either tools or hands, and dine on gilded capons. In Dante's lines, beginning
"I saw Bellincion Berti walk abroad
In leathern girdle, with a clasp of bone,"
you have the expression of his sense of the increasing luxury of the age, already sapping its faith. But when Bellincion Berti walked abroad in skins not yet made into leather, and with the bones of his dinner in a heap at his door, instead of being cut into girdle clasps, he was just as far from capacity of being a Christian.
55. The following passage, from Carlyle's "Chartism," expresses better than any one else has done, or is likely to do it, the nature of this Christian era, (extending from the twelfth to the sixteenth century,) in England,—the like being entirely true of it elsewhere:—
"In those past silent centuries, among those silent classes, much had been going on. Not only had red deer in the New and other forests been got preserved and shot; and treacheries[1] of Simon de Montfort, wars of Red and White Roses, battles of Crecy, battles of Bosworth,
- ↑ Perhaps not altogether so, any more than Oliver's! dear papa Carlyle. We may have to read him also, otherwise than the British populace have yet read, some day.
