stion: How men lived and had their being; were it but economically, as,
what wages they got, and what they bought with these? Unhappily they
cannot.... History, as it stands all bound up in gilt volumes, is but a
shade more instructive than the wooden volumes of a backgammon-board."
Most of us have felt, at one time or another, the truth of these words,
though it is only fair to add that the fault lies not so much at the door
of the modern historian as of our ancestors themselves, who were too busy
with fighting and revelling to leave any but the most meagre account of
their own lives behind them; so that "Redbook Lists and Parliamentary
Registers" are all that the veracious chronicler, who will not let his
imagination run riot, can find to put before us. But happily, in the
wildest days of the Middle Ages, there were found some peace-loving souls
who preferred to drone away their lives in quiet meditation behind the
walls of the great monasteries, undisturbed by the clash of swords. Some
outlet had to be found for their innate energies and their intense
religious enthusiasm; missionary zeal had not yet been invented, and the
writing of books would have seemed to them a waste of good parchment, for
in their eyes the Scriptures and the Aristotelian writings supplied all
the food that the most voracious intellect could crave for. So they
applied all their genius--and it is probable that the flower of the
European race, as far as intelligence and culture are concerned, was
gathered in those days into the Church--and all the ecstatic fervour of
their religious devotion, the strength of which men of these latter days
can hardly realize, to the construction of beautiful buildings for the
worship of God. They have written a history in stone, from which a
thoughtful student can supply much that is left out by the dry-as-dust
annalists, for it is not only the history, but the actual result and
expression, of the lives of the most gifted men of the Middle Ages.

If we would read this history aright it is necessary that we should look
at it as far as possible, as it was originally published. If the old
binding has been torn off, and the volume hedged in by a crowd of modern
literature, we must try to put these aside and consider the book as it was
first issued; in other words, to drop metaphor altogether, in considering
a building like Canterbury Cathedral, we must forget the busy little
country town, with its crowded streets and no