fully developed and in the third book of Paradise Lost we have its classical exposition, just as in Dante we have the classical exposition of the scholastic theology of the Middle Age. In Milton's preoccupation with those discussions which he assigns to the rebel angels in Pandemonium :

Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate,

Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,

he is the child of his time, and his concern with these problems is understood and properly appraised only when we have some acquaintance with the contemporary schools of Protestant thought. But, further-between Shakspeare's and Milton's day there had been development along the lines opened up by the Renaissance as well as by the Reformation. As the Renaissance found expression in Shakspeare and his contemporaries, it was the lust of life, the free play of human nature that was the predominating note. By Milton's day the influence of the revival of Classical antiquity had passed into a new phase. In literature it had now become a restraining and chastening influence as was to be signally illustrated in the great French writers of the seventeenth century-Racine, Boileau, Pascal and Bossuet. And in no great spirit is this new discipline more notably exemplified than in Milton, in whose work the new conception of classical purity and restraint of expression has its highest embodiment in English literature. Doubtless in any age Milton's genius would have tended to severity of form; but had he lived when the Renaissance was at its flood-tide, when men's minds were intoxicated with the new wine of antiquity, such purity of form as he attained would have been impossible even to his genius. But he fell upon an age when maturer and discreeter ideas regarding the classical models prevailed, and it was these ideas working together with his own native instincts that enabled him to produce a poem which by its scope, its style, its structure is comparable to the great creations of antiquity.

It is the great poets who are the supreme interpreters of their age, for it is in their creations that the different sides. of human nature find the fullest expression: in the words of Hamlet, they show us the very body of the time, his form and pressure.' But to receive the full impression of any age, not only its poets but its literature as a whole must be present to our minds. A book like Bacon's Essays, for

example, is an indispensable commentary on the age in which it was produced. The very titles of these Essays suggest the main interests of Bacon's contemporaries. Take such titles as these: 'Of Unitie in Religion,' 'Of Simulation and Dissimulation,' 'Of Seditions and Troubles,' 'Of Cunning,' 'Of Plantations,' 'Of the true Greatness of Kingdomes and Estates.' Bacon's choice of such themes and his manner of handling them give us a deeper insight into the time than any state documents revealing the machinations of statesmen and diplomatists. When Bacon chooses such a subject as 'Unity in Religion' on which to discourse, we are reminded of the great Protestant schism of the sixteenth century, and its determining influence on international relations and the relations of subjects to their rulers. When he writes on 'Dissimulation and Cunning,' we reminded of the new diplomacy which was the birth of the same century, and of which Machiavelli was the arch-deviser and codifier. Thus, Bacon's book is a veritable transcript of his time of its engrossing problems, of its ethical standards, of its conceptions of the general and individual life of man. On the other hand, the only adequate commentary on these Essays is the history of Europe from the day when Luther broke with Rome. Without this commentary the book loses half its meaning, for we thus miss what is all-important to know in the case of every book-how much of it is the author's own, and how much of it is the general property of his time.

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Hitherto I have been mainly emphasising the importance of history as throwing light on literature; let me now say a few words on the light which literature throws on history. It is the unfortunate disability of the writer of history that he cannot jump off his own shadow. Do what he will he cannot get away from himself; his own temperament, his own sympathies and prepossessions, his own vision of life (for we all have one, whether we know it or not) create an atmosphere around him through which he sees, not the real lineaments of the past, but a spectral illusion which he mistakes for the reality. In the often-quoted words of Faust to the enquiring student Wagner, we have the final expression of the historian's impotence to divest himself of his own personality and to see a past age as it appeared to the men who made it. My friend,' says Faust, past times are for us a book with seven seals: what you call the spirit of past times is in truth but

the spirit of him who seeks to reproduce them.' Historians may, indeed, attain to varying degrees of impartiality; some may be more exact than others; may take more comprehensive views, may have a keener insight into the significance of the facts that come under their notice, but they cannot dissolve the refracting medium which is indeed the emanation of their own being.

But not only does his own personality come between the historian and the past; the age in which he lives casts its own shadow over all previous time. How differently did the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries regard the great events and the great characters that have marked the course of man's destinies In great things and small the judgments of the two centuries stand in equal constrast. Take one judgment by a representative mind of the eighteenth century. David Hume, in one of his literary essays, had occasion to compare Bunyan and Parnell, the author of The Hermit-a poem which few but specialists in English literature have now read, and his judgment on their relative merits is that Bunyan is to Parnell what a mole-hill is to a mountain. Can we imagine Hume pronouncing such a judgment had he been born in 1811 instead of in 1711? But, in point of fact, it is not only Hume that is speaking when he pronounces his opinion on the relative merits of Bunyan and Parnell, but the age of which he is the representative spokesman.

But let us take another example which illustrates with wider significance the different attitudes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries towards the epoch-making events of the past. Like Hume, the historian Gibbon is one of the representative minds of the eighteenth century. His point of view with regard to the spiritual forces in human history is that of the movement, known as the Aufklärung, the Enlightenment, and in his famous chapters on the rise and spread of Christianity we have this attitude exemplified in all its implications. His account of the development of the Christian doctrines and institutions, as we know, is a masterpiece of irony

'Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer.'

He records with all his mastery of lucid exposition the external events of the Christian movement. He expounds the policy of the Church and the policy of the empire, and seeks to show that by the concatenation of circumstances Constantine

the Great was constrained to identify himself with the new religion. The problem, as it presents itself to Gibbon, is one simply of dynamical forces-these forces being the clashing interests of sects and parties, the vanity and ambition of individuals, the superstition of the masses. By the fortuitous working of these forces it came about that Christianity emerged triumphant from its death-struggle with Paganism, and by the same fortuitous means it continued to maintain its supremacy. Of religion as an instinct in man, as a force that lay behind all doctrines and institutions, behind the policies of statesmen and ecclesiastics, Gibbon had no conception; and if the conception had been presented to him he would have regarded it as the lingering delusion of the ages of unenlightenment.

By temperament, Gibbon was unsympathetic with enthusiasm in any form; in no age could he have been fired with ardour for any cause. But, had he lived in the nineteenth century instead of the eighteenth, he would not have written of Christianity as he did. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the philosophy of the Enlightenment' no longer satisfied the minds of thinking men. They realised that religion was a

constituent element of human nature and in itself one of the potent factors in the development of humanity, that it was not a figment devised by cunning priests at a given moment as a convenient means of exploiting their fellow creatures. Το illustrate the different points of view of the two countries, let us take a criticism passed on Gibbon's account of the spread of Christianity by one of the most eminent critics of the nineteenth-the French critic Ste. Beuve. Personally Ste. Beuve was at the same point of view with regard to Christianity as Gibbon. He regarded it as a purely natural development, which can be adequately explained by human nature itself and the historical conditions under which the Christian faith made its way into the world. But what is his judgment on the explanation given by Gibbon in his famous chapters? Gibbon, he says, writes of religion like a mandarin. What he meant was that Gibbon dealt with religion in a purely external fashion, and that he was incapable of understanding its real nature and the modes of its working. And Ste. Beuve goes on to make a notable remark which Gibbon could never have made, though both were at one in their attitude towards historical Christianity. 'The moral innovation effected by Christianity,' says the French critic, 'was that it inculcated a keener, a more absolute senti

ment of truth.' And it is in this keener sense of truth that he finds the explanation of that intolerance of other religions which distinguished the Christian from the Pagan. No doubt Ste. Beuve had finer critical instincts than Gibbon, but had he lived in the eighteenth instead of the nineteenth century, even his finer instincts would not have suggested such judgments as those that have been quoted.

The conclusion is that the writer of history sees past ages through a double veil-the veil of his own personality and that of the age to which he himself belongs. But is there any means by which the reader can escape from this double illusion which is thus woven round the past? The question is one which it is the business of philosophy to answer, for it is simply the old question whether mortals are capable of envisaging the ultimate reality of things. Waiving this question, therefore, let us ask another which can be more simply answered. How may the reader of history best guard himself from the inevitably personal presentment of any given period of the past by the later historians of that period, and how can he most effectually assure himself that his own illusions are at least his own? The judicious reader has, of course, one means always at his disposal. He can make his own reserves with regard to the personal element in the work of the writer who is engaging him. He will see that the historian, belonging to some particular school of thought, is apt to select facts and pass judgment on them in accordance with his own point of view. And he will make his qualifications not only with reference to the historian's opinions, but also to the mental qualities which are exhibited in his work. He will make the necessary abatements according as the historian is rhetorical or sentimental, rash or unduly cautious, optimistic or pessimistic in his outlook on human affairs. Such checks as these are in the power of every reader, but they will enable him only partially to control the general picture of a period presented by another mind. Fully to control it, he would require such an amount of knowledge as would enable him to form an independent picture of his own.

But there is another means by which the reader of history may effectually guard himself against the idiosyncrasies of individual historians. It is in the literature of any period that we have the veritable expression of its spirit, defeatured by no distorting medium. By acquainting ourselves, says Bacon, with the substance, the modes of expression of the literature of any