For the more coarse and homely passages with which the drama is
interspersed, I must make the same apology. I put them there
because they were there--because the Middle Age was, in the gross, a
coarse, barbarous, and profligate age--because it was necessary, in
order to bring out fairly the beauty of the central character, to
show 'the crooked and perverse generation' in which she was 'a child
of God without rebuke.' It was, in fact, the very ferocity and
foulness of the time which, by a natural revulsion, called forth at
the same time the Apostolic holiness and the Manichean asceticism of
the Mediaeval Saints. The world was so bad that, to be Saints at
all, they were compelled to go out of the world. It was necessary,
moreover, in depicting the poor man's patroness, to show the
material on which she worked; and those who know the poor, know also
that we can no more judge truly of their characters in the presence
of their benefactors, than we can tell by seeing clay in the
potter's hands what it was in its native pit. These scenes have,
therefore, been laid principally in Elizabeth's absence, in order to
preserve their only use and meaning.
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