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But they had a sore battle: a battle against their own fear of the unseen. They brought with them, out of the heart of Asia, dark and sad nature-superstitions, some of which linger among our peasantry till this day, of elves, trolls, nixes, and what not. Their Thor and Odin were at first, probably, only the thunder and the wind: but they had to be appeased in the dark marches of the forest, where hung rotting on the sacred oaks, amid carcases of goat and horse, the carcases of human victims. No one acquainted with the early legends and ballads of our race, but must perceive throughout them all the prevailing tone of fear and sadness. And to their own superstitions they added those of the Rome which they conquered. They dreaded the Roman she-poisoners and witches, who, like Horace’s Canidia, still performed horrid rites in graveyards and dark places of the earth. They dreaded as magical the delicate images engraved on old Greek gems. They dreaded the very Roman cities they had destroyed. They were the work of enchanters. Like the ruins of St. Albans here in England, they were all full of devils, guarding the treasures which the Romans had hidden. The Caesars became to them magical man-gods. The poet Virgil became the prince of necromancers. If the secrets of Nature were to be known, they were to be known by unlawful means, by prying into the mysteries of the old heathen magicians, or of the Mohammedan doctors of Cordova and Seville; and those who dared to do so were respected and feared, and often came to evil ends. It needed moral courage, then, to face and interpret fact. Such brave men as Pope Gerbert, Roger Bacon, Galileo, even Kepler, did not lead happy lives; some of them found themselves in prison. All the medieval sages–even Albertus Magnus- -were stigmatised as magicians. One wonders that more of them did not imitate poor Paracelsus, who, unable to get a hearing for his coarse common sense, took–vain and sensual–to drinking the laudanum which he himself had discovered, and vaunted as a priceless boon to men; and died as the fool dieth, in spite of all his wisdom. For the “Romani nominis umbra,” the shadow of the mighty race whom they had conquered, lay heavy on our forefathers for centuries. And their dread of the great heathens was really a dread of Nature, and of the powers thereof. For when the authority of great names has reigned unquestioned for many centuries, those names become, to the human mind, integral and necessary parts of Nature itself. They are, as it were, absorbed into it; they become its laws, its canons, its demiurges, and guardian spirits; their words become regarded as actual facts; in one word, they become a superstition, and are feared as parts of the vast unknown; and to deny what they have said is, in the minds of the many, not merely to fly in the face of reverent wisdom, but to fly in the face of facts. During a great part of the Middle Ages, for instance, it was impossible for an educated man to think of nature itself, without thinking first of what Aristotle had said of her. Aristotle’s dicta were Nature; and when Benedetti, at Venice, opposed in 1585 Aristotle’s opinions on violent and natural motion, there were hundreds, perhaps, in the universities of Europe–as there certainly were in the days of the immortal “Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum”–who were ready, in spite of all Benedetti’s professed reverence for Aristotle, to accuse him of outraging not only the father of philosophy, but Nature itself and its palpable and notorious facts. For the restoration of letters in the fifteenth century had not at first mended matters, so strong was the dread of Nature in the minds of the masses. The minds of men had sported forth, not toward any sound investigation of facts, but toward an eclectic resuscitation of Neoplatonism; which endured, not without a certain beauty and use–as let Spenser’s “Faerie Queen” bear witness–till the latter half of the seventeenth century.