and their harpers, and St. Patrick and St.
Malachy and Oliver Cromwell and William III. After the unintelligible
symbols on the rocks, how familiar and homelike seemed the sculptures on
the Celtic crosses. They were mostly about people, and people whom we
had known from earliest childhood. There were Adam and Eve, and Cain
slaying Abel, and the Magi. They were members of our family.

But between us and the builders of the under-ground chapel there was a
great gulf. There was no means of spiritual communication across the
abyss. A scrap of writing, a bit of poetry, a name handed down by
tradition, would have been worth all the relics discovered by
archaeologists.

There is justification for the traveler's preference for the things he
has read about, for these are the things which resist the changes of
time. Only he must remember that they are better preserved in the book
than in the places where they happened. The impression which any
generation makes on the surface of the earth is very slight. It cannot
give the true story of the brief occupancy. That requires some more
direct interpretation.

The magic carpet which carries us into any age not our own is woven by
the poets and historians. Without their aid we may travel through Space,
but not through Time.

THE OBVIOUSNESS OF DICKENS

In the college world it is a point of honor for the successive classes
to treat each other with contumely. The feud between freshman and
sophomore goes on automatically. Only when one has become a senior may
he, without losing caste, recognize a freshman as a youth of promise,
and admit that a sophomore is not half bad. Such disinterested criticism
is tolerated because it is evidently the result of the mellowing
influence of time.

The same tendency is seen in literary and artistic judgments. It is
never good taste to admit the good taste of the generation that
immediately precedes us. Its innocent admirations are flouted and its
standards are condemned as provincial. For we are always emerging from
the dark ages and contrasting their obscurity with our marvelous light.
The sixteenth century scorned the fifteenth century for its manifold
superstitions. Thomas Fuller tells us that his enlightened contempories
in the seventeenth century treated the enthusiasms of the sixteenth
century with scant respect. The price of martyrs' ashes rises and falls
in Smithfield market. At a later period Pope writes,--

"We think our fathe