customs and sentiments of the age as well as if it were authentic; and the one great advantage of the old over the new historian is that he feels the passions and prejudices of his own time, and reflects them without either condemnation or apology. The nineteenth-century mind working on fourteenth-century material is chilly in its analysis, and Draconian in its judgment. It can and does enlighten us on many significant points, but it is powerless to breathe into its pages that warm and vivid life which lies so far beyond our utmost powers of sympathy or comprehension.
Now, there are many excellent and very intelligent people to whom the fourteenth century or any other departed century is without intrinsic interest. Mr. John Morley has emphatically recorded his sentiments on the subject. "I do not in the least want to know what happened in the past," he says, "except as it enables me to see my way more clearly through what is happening now." Here is the utilitarian view concisely and comprehensively stated; and it would be difficult to say how Froissart, any more than Tacitus or Xenophon, can help us efficaciously to understand the
