For this reason, Lewis thought an ancient Roman had more in common with human beings from the eighteenth century (like, say, Samuel Johnson), indeed, even with Jane Austen, than either of them have in common with us, “because,” he explains, “the old Model still underlies their work.”30 For this reason we can loosely think of Lewis’s medieval period as the “Long Middle Ages,” which extended from Plato to Samuel Johnson, and sometimes even to Wordsworth.
