ght
Roman patricians and Greek oligarchs on to the stage, it made them
behave like French courtiers or Castilian grandees or English peers.
When it had to deal with ancient heroes, it clothed them in the garb
and imputed to them the sentiments of knights-errant. Then came the
revolutionary criticism of the eighteenth century, which assumed that
everything old was wrong, while everything new was right. It recognized
crudely the differences between one age and another, but it had a way
of looking down upon all ages except the present. This intolerance shown
toward the past was indeed a measure of the crudeness with which it was
comprehended. Because Mohammed, if he had done what he did, in France
and in the eighteenth century, would have been called an impostor,
Voltaire, the great mouthpiece and representative of this style of
criticism, portrays him as an impostor. Recognition of the fact that
different ages are different, together with inability to perceive that
they ought to be different, that their differences lie in the nature of
progress,--this was the prominent characteristic of eighteenth-century
criticism. Of all the great men of that century, Lessing was perhaps the
only one who outgrew this narrow critical habit.

Now nineteenth-century criticism not only knows that in no preceding age
have men thought and behaved as they now think and behave, but it also
understands that old-fashioned thinking and behaviour was in its way
just as natural and sensible as that which is now new-fashioned. It does
not flippantly sneer at an ancient custom because we no longer cherish
it; but with an enlightened regard for everything human, it inquires
into its origin, traces its effects, and endeavours to explain its
decay. It is slow to characterize Mohammed as an impostor, because it
has come to feel that Arabia in the seventh century is one thing and
Europe in the nineteenth another. It is scrupulous about branding
Caesar as an usurper, because it has discovered that what Mr. Mill calls
republican liberty and what Cicero called republican liberty are widely
different notions. It does not tell us to bow down before Lucretius
and Virgil as unapproachable models, while lamenting our own hopeless
inferiority; nor does it tell us to set them down as half-skilled
apprentices, while congratulating ourselves on our own comfortable
superiority; but it tells us to study them as the exponents of an age
forever gone, from which we have st