ng, or is oppressed by a sense of
mystery, of wonder, or of sorrow unrevealed, which defies tears.

This revolution in our conception of History, this boundless industry
which in Germany, France, England, Italy, has led to the printing of
mountains of forgotten memoirs, correspondences, State papers, this
endless sifting of evidence, this treasuring above riches of the slight
results slowly and patiently drawn, is neither accident, nor transient
caprice, nor antiquarian frenzy, but a phase of the guiding impulse,
the supreme instinct of this age--the ardour to know all, to experience
all, to be all, to suffer all, in a word, to know the Truth of
things--if haply there come with it immortal life, even if there come
with it silence and utter death. The deepened significance of history
springs thus from the deepened significance of life, and the passion of
our interest in the past from the passion of our interest in the
present. The half-effaced image on a coin, the illuminated margin of a
mediaeval manuscript, the smile on a fading picture--if these have
become, as it were, fountains of unstable reveries, perpetuating the
Wonder which is greater than Knowledge, it is a power from the present
that invests them with this magic. Life has become more
self-conscious; not of the narrow self merely, but of that deeper Self,
the mystic Presence which works behind the veil.

World-history is no more the fairy tale whose end is death, but laden
with eternal meanings, significances, intimations, swift gleams of the
Timeless manifesting itself in Time. And the distinguishing function
of History as a science lies in its ceaseless effort not only to lay
bare, to crystallize the moments of all these manifestations, but to
discover their connecting bond, the ties that unite them to each other
and to the One, the hidden source of these varied manifestations,
whether revealed as transcendent thought, art, or action.

Hence, as in prosecuting elsewhere our inquiry into the origin of the
French Monarchy or the decline of oligarchic Venice, we examined not
only the characters, incidents, policies immediately connected with the
subject, but attempted an answer to the question--What is the place of
these incidents in the universal scheme of things? so in the treatment
of the theme now before us, the origins of Imperial Britain, pursuing a
similar plan, we have to consider not merely the relations of Imperial
Britain to the England and Sco