mosphere as well as an adventure. It was precisely these outlandish
visions that truly came home to everybody; it was the royal councils and
feudal quarrels that were comparatively remote. The Holy Land was much
nearer to a plain man's house than Westminster, and immeasurably nearer
than Runymede. To give a list of English kings and parliaments, without
pausing for a moment upon this prodigious presence of a religious
transfiguration in common life, is something the folly of which can but
faintly be conveyed by a more modern parallel, with secularity and
religion reversed. It is as if some Clericalist or Royalist writer
should give a list of the Archbishops of Paris from 1750 to 1850, noting
how one died of small-pox, another of old age, another by a curious
accident of decapitation, and throughout all his record should never
once mention the nature, or even the name, of the French Revolution.

VII

THE PROBLEM OF THE PLANTAGENETS

It is a point of prestige with what is called the Higher Criticism in
all branches to proclaim that certain popular texts and authorities are
"late," and therefore apparently worthless. Two similar events are
always the same event, and the later alone is even credible. This
fanaticism is often in mere fact mistaken; it ignores the most common
coincidences of human life: and some future critic will probably say
that the tale of the Tower of Babel cannot be older than the Eiffel
Tower, because there was certainly a confusion of tongues at the Paris
Exhibition. Most of the mediaeval remains familiar to the modern reader
are necessarily "late," such as Chaucer or the Robin Hood ballads; but
they are none the less, to a wiser criticism, worthy of attention and
even trust. That which lingers after an epoch is generally that which
lived most luxuriantly in it. It is an excellent habit to read history
backwards. It is far wiser for a modern man to read the Middle Ages
backwards from Shakespeare, whom he can judge for himself, and who yet
is crammed with the Middle Ages, than to attempt to read them forwards
from Caedmon, of whom he can know nothing, and of whom even the
authorities he must trust know very little. If this be true of
Shakespeare, it is even truer, of course, of Chaucer. If we really want
to know what was strongest in the twelfth century, it is no bad way to
ask what remained of it in the fourteenth. When the average reader turns
to the "Canterbury Tales," which are still as a