ans, in
his sermons, in his dealings with the poor and the young forces of
imagination and sympathy. What was enchaining him to this new study was
not, to begin with, that patient love of ingenious accumulation which
is the learned temper proper, the temper, in short, of science. It was
simply a passionate sense of the human problems which underlie all the
dry and dusty detail of history and give it tone and color, a passionate
desire to rescue something more of human life from the drowning,
submerging past, to realize for himself and others the solidarity and
continuity of mankind's long struggle from the beginning until now.

Langham had had much experience of Elsmere's versatility and pliancy,
but he had never realized it so much as now, while he sat listening to
the vivid, many-colored speech getting quicker and quicker, and more
and more telling and original as Robert got more absorbed and excited by
what he had to say. He was endeavoring to describe to Langham the sort
of book be thought might be written on the rise of modern society
in Gaul, dwelling first of all on the outward spectacle of the
blood-stained Frankish world as it was, say, in the days of Gregory
the Great, on its savage kings, its fiendish women, its bishops and
its saints; and then, on the conflict of ideas going on behind all the
fierce incoherence of the Empire's decay, the struggle of Roman order
and of German freedom, of Roman luxury and of German hardness; above
all, the war of orthodoxy and heresy, with its strange political
complications. And then, discontented still, as though the heart of the
matter was still untouched, he went on, restlessly wandering the while,
with his long arms linked behind him, throwing out words at an object
in his mind, trying to grasp and analyze that strange sense which haunts
the student of Rome's decline as it once overshadowed the infancy of
Europe, that sense of a slowly departing majesty, of a great presence
just withdrawn, and still incalculably potent, traceable throughout in
that humbling consciousness of Goth or Frank that they were but 'beggars
hutting in a palace--the place had harbored greater men than they!'

'There is one thing,' Langham said presently, in his slow, nonchalant
voice, when the tide of Robert's ardor ebbed for a moment, 'that doesn't
seem to have touched you yet. But you will come to it. To my mind, it
makes almost the chief interest of history. It is just this. History
depends on