ceased to seek for increase of knowledge, and, contented with what they
possess, have endeavoured to make use of it for purposes of moral
cultivation. Such was the condition of the Greeks through many ages before
the Persian war; such was that of the Romans till the world revenged itself
upon its conquerors by the introduction among them of the habits of the
conquered; and such again became the condition of Europe when the Northern
nations grafted the religion and the laws of the Western empire on their
own hardy natures, and shaped out that wonderful spiritual and political
organisation which remained unshaken for a thousand years.

The aspirant after sanctity in the fifteenth century of the Christian era
found a model which he could imitate in detail in the saint of the fifth.
The gentleman at the court of Edward IV. or Charles of Burgundy could
imagine no nobler type of heroism than he found in the stories of King
Arthur's knights. The forms of life had become more elaborate--the surface
of it more polished--but the life itself remained essentially the same; it
was the development of the same conception of human excellence; just as the
last orders of Gothic architecture were the development of the first, from
which the idea had worked its way till the force of it was exhausted.

A condition of things differing alike both outwardly and inwardly from that
into which a happier fortune has introduced ourselves, is necessarily
obscure to us. In the alteration of our own character, we have lost the key
which would interpret the characters of our fathers, and the great men even
of our own English history before the Reformation seem to us almost like
the fossil skeletons of another order of beings. Some broad conclusions as
to what they were are at least possible to us, however; and we are able to
determine, with tolerable certainty, the social condition of the people of
this country, such as it was before the movements of the sixteenth century,
and during the process of those movements.