e in
our history has a character and a physiognomy of its own. The sixteenth
century speaks to us of change and adventure in every form, of ships and
statecraft, of discovery and desecration, of masterful sovereigns and
unscrupulous ministers. We evoke the memory of Henry VIII and Elizabeth,
of Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, of Drake and Raleigh, while the gentler
virtues of Thomas More and Philip Sidney seem but rare flowers by the
wayside.

The glory of the seventeenth century shines out amid the clash of arms,
in battles fought for noble principles, in the lives and deaths of
Falkland and Hampden, of Blake, Montrose, and Cromwell. If its nobility
is dimmed as we pass from the world of Shakespeare and Milton to that of
Dryden and Defoe, yet there is sufficient unity in its central theme to
justify the enthusiasm of those who praise it as the heroic age of
English history.

Less justice, perhaps, is done when we characterize the eighteenth
century as that of elegance and wit; when, heedless of the great names
of Chatham, Wolfe, and Clive, we fill the forefront of our picture with
clubs and coffee-houses, with the graces of Chesterfield and Horace
Walpole, the beauties of Gainsborough and Romney, or the masterpieces of
Sheraton and Adam. But each generalization, as we make it, seems more
imperfect and unfair; and partly because Carlyle abused it so
unmercifully, this century has in the last fifty years received ample
justice from many of our ablest writers.

Difficult indeed then it must seem to give adequate expression to the
life of a century like the nineteenth, so swift, so restless, so
many-sided, so full of familiar personages, and of conflicts which have
hardly yet receded to a distance where the historian can judge them
aright. The rich luxuriance of movements and of individual characters
chokes our path; it is a labyrinth in which one may well lose one's way
and fail to see the wood for the trees.

The scientist would be protesting (all this time) that this is a very
superficial aspect of the matter. He would recast our framework for us
and teach us to follow out the course of our history through the
development of mathematics, physics, and biology, to pass from Newton to
Harvey, and from Watt to Darwin, and in the relation of these sciences
to one another to find the clue to man's steady progress.

The tale thus told is indeed wonderful to read and worthy of the
telling; but, to appreciate it fully, it need