be
considered further along.

[92] _Storia di Como_, vol. i, 440.

[93] _Natural History of Wiltshire_, by John Aubrey, written, but not
published, in 1686.

[94] _A. Q. C._, vol. x, 82.

[95] Roughly speaking, the year 1600 may be taken as a date dividing
the two periods. Addison, writing in the _Spectator_, March 1, 1711,
draws the following distinction between a speculative and an operative
member of a trade or profession: "I live in the world rather as a
spectator of mankind, than as one of the species, by which means I have
made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and _artisan_,
without ever meddling with any practical part of life." By a
Speculative Mason, then, is meant a man who, though not an actual
architect, sought and obtained membership among Free-masons. Such men,
scholars and students, began to enter the order as early as 1600, if
not earlier. If by Operative Mason is meant one who attached no moral
meaning to his tools, there were none such in the olden time--all
Masons, even those in the Guilds, using their tools as moral emblems in
a way quite unknown to builders of our day. 'Tis a pity that this light
of poetry has faded from our toil, and with it the joy of work.

[96] _History of Masonry_, p. 66.

[97] For a single example, the _Diary_ of Elias Ashmole, under date of
1646.

[98] Time out of mind it has been the habit of writers, both within the
order and without, to treat Masonry as though it were a kind of
agglomeration of archaic remains and platitudinous moralizings, made up
of the heel-taps of Operative legend and the fag-ends of Occult lore.
Far from it! If this were the fact the present writer would be the
first to admit it, but it is not the fact. Instead, the idea that an
order so noble, so heroic in its history, so rich in symbolism, so
skilfully adjusted, and with so many traces of remote antiquity, was
the creation of pious fraud, or else of an ingenious conviviality,
passes the bounds of credulity and enters the domain of the absurd.
This fact will be further emphasized in the chapter following, to which
those are respectfully referred who go everywhere else, _except to
Masonry itself_, to learn what Masonry is and how it came to be.

[99] _Livre du Compagnonnage_, by Agricol Perdiguier, 1841. George
Sand's novel, _Le Compagnon du Tour de France_, was published the same
year. See full account of this order in Gould, _History of Masonry_,
vol. i, chap. v.