Note 254 — Chapter XVI

Fleury, who in his fifth Discourse has spoken with equal contempt of the theological and literary merits of the scholastics, winds up by reminding the reader that they wrote at a time when everything exhibited the same bad taste as was displayed in Gothic architecture, that absurd assemblage of petty ornaments “which no architect would ever dream of imitating.” Nothing endurable in point of style or art was, according to him, to be seen in Europe from the fall of the Roman empire until the fifteenth century, that is, during the whole essentially Christian period. With what amazement would he have beheld the Christian Renaissance of our own days, and the reflux of taste into mediæval channels!