nting his whole ways of seeing and thinking from childhood to the
grave! Amid all the intellectual dislocation of the spectacle, indeed,
he perceives certain Greeks and certain Latins who represent a forward
strain, who belong as it seems to a world of their own, a world ahead of
them. To them he stretches out his hand: '_You_,' he says to them,
'though your priests spoke to you not of Christ, but of Zeus and
Artemis, _you_ are really my kindred!' But intellectually they stand
alone. Around them, after them, for long ages the world 'spake as a
child, felt as a child, understood as a child.'

Then he sees what it is makes the difference, digs the gulf.
'_Science_,' the mind cries, '_ordered knowledge_.' And so for the first
time the modern recognises what the accumulations of his forefathers
have done for him. He takes the torch which man has been so long and
patiently fashioning to his hand, and turns it on the past, and at every
step the sight grows stranger, and yet more moving, more pathetic. The
darkness into which he penetrates does but make him grasp his own
guiding light the more closely. And yet, bit by bit, it has been
prepared for him by these groping half conscious generations, and the
scrutiny which began in repulsion and laughter ends in a marvelling
gratitude.

But the repulsion and the laughter come first, and during this winter of
work Elsmere felt them both very strongly. He would sit in the morning
buried among the records of decaying Rome and emerging France,
surrounded by Chronicles, by Church Councils, by lives of the Saints, by
primitive systems of law, pushing his imaginative impetuous way through
them. Sometimes Catherine would be there, and he would pour out on her
something of what was in his own mind.

One day he was deep in the life of a certain saint. The saint had been
bishop of a diocese in Southern France. His biographer was his successor
in the see, a man of high political importance in the Burgundian state,
renowned besides for sanctity and learning. Only some twenty years
separated the biography, at the latest, from the death of its subject.
It contained some curious material for social history, and Robert was
reading it with avidity. But it was, of course, a tissue of marvels. The
young bishop had practised every virtue known to the time, and wrought
every conceivable miracle, and the miracles were better told than usual,
with more ingenuity, more imagination. Perhaps on that accoun