finds justification with Ruskin.  “The essence of modern romance is simply the return of the heart and fancy to the things in which they naturally take pleasure; and half the influence of the best romances, of ‘Ivanhoe,’ or ‘Marmion,’ or ‘The Crusaders,’ or ’The Lady of the Lake,’ is completely dependent upon the accessories of armour and costume.” [33] Still Ruskin had the critical good sense to rate such as they below the genuine Scotch novels, like “Old Mortality” and “The Heart of Mid-Lothian”; and he is quite stern towards the melodramatic Byronic ideal of Venice.  “The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never save the remains of those mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing flowers, and they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they stood in their own strength. . . .  The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream.” [34] For it cannot be too often repeated that the romance is not in the Middle Ages themselves, but in their strangeness to our imagination.  The closer one gets to them, the less romantic they appear.

MEDIEVAL SOCIAL IDEALS.—­It is obvious how a fondness for the Middle Ages, in a man of Scott’s conservative temper, might confirm him in his attachment to high Tory principles and to an aristocratic-feudal ideal of society; or how, in an enthusiastic artist like Pugin, and a gentleman of high-strung chivalric spirit like Sir Kenelm Digby, it might even lead to an adoption of the whole mediaeval religious system.  But it is not so easy, at first sight, to understand why the same thing should have conducted Ruskin and William Morris to opinions that were more “advanced” than those of the most advanced Liberal.  Orthodox economists looked upon the theories put forward in Ruskin’s “Unto this Last” (1860), “Munera Pulveris” (1862-63), and “Fors Clavigera” (1871-84), as the eccentricities of a distinguished art critic, disporting himself in unfamiliar fields of thought.  And when in 1883 the poet of “The Earthly Paradise” joined the Democratic Federation, and subsequently the Socialist League, and was arrested and fined one shilling and costs for addressing open-air meetings, obstructing public highways, and striking policemen, amusement was mingled with disapproval.  What does this dreamer of dreams and charming decorative artist in a London police court?

But Socialism, though appearing on the face of it the most modern of doctrines, is in a sense reactionary, like Catholicism, or knight-errantry, or Gothic architecture.  That is, those who protest against the individualism of the existing social order are wont to contrast it unfavourably with the principle of association which is found everywhere in the Middle Ages.  No mediaeval man was free or independent; all men were members one of another.  The feudal system itself was an elaborate network of interdependent rights and