had access to learning that
they formed a caste without jealousy, anxious to recruit from among
ambitious youth. The opportunities of the common man were small; the
opportunities of the uncommon man were immense. Perhaps because of this
three of the richest epochs in mankind came about; the self-made
merchant, writing to his son, was not wrong to say that there is plenty
of room at the top, and no elevator; but he should have added that there
was a mob on the stairs and on the top a press agency.

My general impression of the Medicis is a highly select society,
centring round a Platonic academy which radiated the only available
culture of the day, the Latin and the Greek. War, intrigue, clerical
ambition, passion, and murder, all these made of a century a coloured
background against which stand out any flowers that knew how to bloom.
The small, parochial society of the Medicis wanted flowers; to-day, we
want bouquets. It was the same in the big period that includes
Elizabeth, the period that saw Sydney, Beaumont, Sir Walter Raleigh,
Shakespeare, Spenser;--here again a nucleus of time haloed with the
golden dust of thought, as a fat comet draws its golden trail. The
Elizabethan period was the heroic time of English history, the time of
romance, because it sought the unknown land and the unknown truth,
because if some easily went from gutter to gallows, others as easily
found their way from gutter to palace. This is true also of the period
of Louis XIV., an inferior person, of barbarous vanity, of negligent
uxoriousness, untiring stratagem, but a great man all the same because
greedy of all that life can give, whether beautiful women, broad
kingdoms, or sharp intellects. To please him, Moliere, Boileau, Racine,
and many of less importance, danced their little dance under the
umbrella of his patronage. They are still dancing, and Louis XIV., that
typical big-wig, stands acquitted.

When one thinks of these periods, one is, perhaps, too easily
influenced, for one compares them with one's own, its haste, its scurry
for money, its noisy hustle. One fails to see the flaws in other times,
one forgets the spurns that merit of the unworthy took, the crumb that
the poor man of thought picked up from the carpet of the man of place.
But still, but still ... like an obstinate old lady, that is all one
can say, one feels that those were better days for genius, because then
respectability was unborn.

It may be that already my reade