WINE, WOMEN, AND SONG MEDIEVAL LATIN STUDENTS' SONGS Now First Translated into English Verse WITH AN ESSAY BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS London CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY 1884 [All rights reserved] ΤΟ ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Dear Louis, To you, in memory of past symposia, when wit (your wit) flowed freer than our old Forzato, I dedicate this little book, my pastime through three anxious months. Yours, JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. Villa Emily, San Remo, May 1884. Wine, Women, and Song. WHEN I. we try to picture to ourselves the intellectual and moral state of Europe in the Middle Ages, some fixed and almost stereotyped idcas immediately suggest themselves. We think of the nations immersed in a gross mental lethargy; passively witnessing the gradual extinction of arts and sciences which Greece and Rome had splendidly inaugurated; allowing libraries and monuments of antique civilisation to crumble into dust; while they trembled under a dull and brooding terror of coming judgment, shrank from natural enjoyment as from deadly sin, or yielded themselves with brutal eagerness to the satisfaction of vulgar appetites. Preoccupation with the other world in this long period weakens man's hold upon the things that make his life desirable. Philosophy is sunk in the slough of ignorant, perversely subtle disputation |