phs into paintings. He lifts the past into the present. The
event is seen as though it happened yesterday, and the persons, be
they kings or plough-boys, appear as if living to-day. Their hearts,
affections, motives, thoughts, are just like those of men and women in
our time. Their clothing and way of living may be different, but they
are the sort of human beings with which we are acquainted. Better yet,
it is not only the men with crowns on their heads, or the women who
wear jewelled and embroidered robes, or riders locked up in steel, or
men under tonsure or tiara, that did great things and made the world
move. Carleton shows how the milk-maid, the wagoner, the blacksmith,
the spinster with the distaff, the rower of the boat, the common
soldier on foot, the student in his cell, and the peddler with his
pack, all had a part in working out the wonderful story.

Had a part, did I say? No, in Carleton's story he _has_ a part. No
writer more frequently and with keener effect uses the historical
present. Compare Carleton's straightforward narration and marching
chapters with the average British writer of history, and at once we
see the difference between chroniclers,--who give such enormous space
to kings, queens and ecclesiastical and military figureheads, almost
to the extent (in the eye of the philosophic student, at least) of
caricature,--and this modern scribe, to whom every true man is a
sovereign, while a king is no more than a man. While well able to
measure personalities and forces, to divine causes, and to discern and
emphasize in the foreground of his pictures, even as an artist does,
the important figure, yet Carleton is never at a loss to do this
because the real hero may be of humble birth or in modest apparel.

In travelling, the little child from the car window will notice many
things in the landscape and about the houses passed, belonging to his
lowly world of experience, no higher than the top of a yardstick, to
which the average adult is blind. Carleton looked with the child's eye
over history's field. He brings before the front lights of his stage
what will at once catch the attention of the young people, to whom the
deeper things of life may be invisible mystery. Yet, Carleton's books
are always enjoyable to the mature man, for he discerns beneath the
vivid picturing and simple rhetoric, so pleasing to the child, a
practical knowledge and a philosophic depth which shows that the
writer is a master of t