to imitate the wild doings of Nature?  The passage of the ages does not make these men seem venerable, because their deeds are no longer intelligible.  Mellefont Abbey is in ruins, but we can easily restore it in imagination.  We can picture the great buildings as they were before the iconoclasts destroyed them.  The prehistoric place of worship in the middle of the hill is practically unchanged.  But the clue to its meaning is lost.

I could not make the ancient builders and worshipers seem real.  It was a relief to come up into the sunshine where people of our own kind had walked, the Kings of Tara and their harpers, and St. Patrick and St. Malachy and Oliver Cromwell and William III.  After the unintelligible symbols on the rocks, how familiar and homelike seemed the sculptures on the Celtic crosses.  They were mostly about people, and people whom we had known from earliest childhood.  There were Adam and Eve, and Cain slaying Abel, and the Magi.  They were members of our family.

But between us and the builders of the under-ground chapel there was a great gulf.  There was no means of spiritual communication across the abyss.  A scrap of writing, a bit of poetry, a name handed down by tradition, would have been worth all the relics discovered by archaeologists.

There is justification for the traveler’s preference for the things he has read about, for these are the things which resist the changes of time.  Only he must remember that they are better preserved in the book than in the places where they happened.  The impression which any generation makes on the surface of the earth is very slight.  It cannot give the true story of the brief occupancy.  That requires some more direct interpretation.

The magic carpet which carries us into any age not our own is woven by the poets and historians.  Without their aid we may travel through Space, but not through Time.

THE OBVIOUSNESS OF DICKENS

In the college world it is a point of honor for the successive classes to treat each other with contumely.  The feud between freshman and sophomore goes on automatically.  Only when one has become a senior may he, without losing caste, recognize a freshman as a youth of promise, and admit that a sophomore is not half bad.  Such disinterested criticism is tolerated because it is evidently the result of the mellowing influence of time.

The same tendency is seen in literary and artistic judgments.  It is never good taste to admit the good taste of the generation that immediately precedes us.  Its innocent admirations are flouted and its standards are condemned as provincial.  For we are always emerging from the dark ages and contrasting their obscurity with our marvelous light.  The sixteenth century scorned the fifteenth century for its manifold superstitions.  Thomas Fuller tells us that his enlightened contempories in the seventeenth century treated the enthusiasms of the sixteenth century with scant respect.  The price of martyrs’ ashes rises and falls in Smithfield market.  At a later period Pope writes,—­