138 Mediceval England. 



the past. It is no longer fancied that to learn by rote a few 

 score of names and dates, to get np " tables of kings/' and 

 long lists of battles, is to become a historian. In looking back 

 to any particular period, we want to know something more than 

 the external facts of public and political transactions. We 

 desire to gain an insight into the conditions of the people, the 

 relations in which the various classes of society stood towards 

 each other, and to understand the nature of the impulses by 

 which retrogression was compelled, or progress was achieved. 

 The ideal of social development is the substitution of enlightened 

 opinion for brute force, the enlargement of the total quantity of 

 the means of well being, and their more equitable diffusion, 

 so as to realize Benthanr's grand desideratum of the <c greatest 

 happiness of the greatest number." Keeping this in view, we 

 are especially interested in those movements by which mediaeval 

 ideas and institutions were graduallyreplaced bymodern arrange- 

 ments, destined in their turn to give way before that increase of 

 intelligence which promises to be the great characteristic of the 

 next epoch in the civilization of man. 



An enlightened study of history is alike fatal to a supersti- 

 tious reverence, or a self-sufficient contempt of the past. We 

 discover no " good old times " that we would exchange for our 

 own, and in the sense in which Tennyson exclaims — 



" Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day ; 

 Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay," 



we value a year of the present more than a generation of a 

 barbarous age. And if such a comparison tends to puff us up 

 with pride, the very study which suggests it, supplies the cor- 

 rective of which our vanity has need. We select, for example, a 

 period in our own history many centuries ago; we see the action 

 of the upward struggle which was then going on, and we find 

 that, notwithstanding our inheritance of the victories which our 

 forefathers won, the work which remains to be accomplished is 

 far larger than that which has already been achieved, and we 

 are made to feel that, although our days may be hereafter 

 " good old times " to our posterity, on account of the service- 

 able materials we shall leave behind us, they will likewise be 

 " bad old times " when a wiser generation looks back upon 

 the ignorance, crime, pauperism, and suffering by wliich our 

 condition is so sadly marred. 



A work like Mr. Wright's History of Domestic Manners and 

 Sentiments in "England, during the Middle Ages, furnishes a 

 store of delightful reading bearing upon the preceding remarks. 

 Aided by his laborious, but gracefully employed learning, and 

 assisted by the hundreds of curious illustrations copied from 

 authentic sources by Mr. Fairholt's pencil, we can make a morn- 



