all radicals were scoundrels; he could not accept her editor's evidence,
and (by the way) the view of this amateur collector without a tincture
of historical scholarship actually imposed itself on Europe for nearly
seventy years!

And the third character in the witness is support: the support upon
converging lines of other human testimony, most of it indifferent, some
(this is essential) casual and by the way--deprived therefore of motive.

When I shall find these canons satisfied to oppose the strong
probability and tradition of the Dauphin's death in prison I shall doubt
that death, but not before.




The Absence of the Past


It is perhaps not possible to put into human language that emotion
which rises when a man stands upon some plot of European soil and can
say with certitude to himself: "Such and such great, or wonderful, or
beautiful things happened here."

Touch that emotion ever so lightly and it tumbles into the commonplace,
and the deadest of commonplace. Neglect it ever so little and the
Present (which is never really there, for even as you walk across
Trafalgar Square it is yesterday and tomorrow that are in your mind),
the Present, I say, or rather the immediate flow of things, occupies you
altogether. But there is a mood, and it is a mood common in men who have