Each limb, each muscle, each fibre of the huge prostrate body was twisted and turned in every direction.

Surely it must have been a keen satisfaction to those anatomists of the mind, to be able, at their debut, to make experiments on a large scale; to have a dead society to dissect, for their first "subject." Thus we see melancholy and meditation, the demons of analysis and controversy, appear at the same moment, and, as it were, hand-in-hand.
At one extremity of this era of transition is Longinus, at the other St.Augustine.We must beware of casting a disdainful eye upon that epoch wherein all that has since borne fruit was contained in germs; upon that epoch whose least eminent writers, if we may be pardoned a vulgar but expressive phrase, made fertilizer for the harvest that was to follow.

The Middle Ages were grafted on the Lower Empire.
Behold, then, a new religion, a new society; upon this twofold foundation there must inevitably spring up a new poetry.

Previously--- we beg pardon for setting forth a result which the reader has probably already foreseen from what has been said above--previously, following therein the course pursued by the ancient polytheism and philosophy, the purely epic muse of the ancients had studied nature in only a single aspect, casting aside without pity almost everything in art which, in the world subjected to its imitation, had not relation to a certain, type of beauty.

A type which was magnificent at first, but, as always happens with everything systematic, became in later times false, trivial and conventional.