admirable and necessary work.

But when it was done, art claimed its place in this work. The desire
sprang up among historians to conceive all this history in the
imagination, to shape vividly its scenery, to animate and individualise
its men and women, to paint the life of the human soul in it, to clothe
it in flesh and blood, to make its feet move and its eyes flash--but to
do all these things within the limits of the accurate knowledge which
historical criticism had defined. "Let us saturate ourselves," said the
historians, "with clear knowledge of the needful facts, and then,
without violation of our knowledge, imagine the human life, the
landscape, the thinking and feeling of a primæval man, of his early
religion, of his passions; of Athens when the Persian came, of Rome when
the Republic was passing into the Empire, of a Provincial in Spain or
Britain, of a German town in the woods by the river. Let us see in
imagination as well as in knowledge an English settlement on the Welsh
border, an Italian mediæval town when its art was being born, a Jewish
village when Christ wandered into its streets, a musician or a painter's
life at a time when Greek art was decaying, or when a new impulse like
the Renaissance or the French Revolution came upon the world." When that
effort of the historians had established itself, and we have seen it
from blossoming to fruitage, people began to wonder that no poet had
ever tried to do this kind of work. It seemed eminently fitted for a
poet's hand, full of subjects alluring to the penetrative imagination.
It needed, of course, some scholarship, for it demanded accuracy in its
grasp of the main ideas of the time to be represented; but that being
given, immense opportunities remained for pictures of human life, full
of colour, thought and passions; for subtle and brilliant
representations of the eternal desires and thinkings of human nature as
they were governed by the special circumstances of the time in which the