Apart from these inevitable breakdowns in judgment, such as fanaticism can never escape, the description of the period is, as I have said, good, and that of the travels of Marco Polo excellent. The succeeding pages which begin the story of the Ottoman Turks I must leave to a later chapter. I lay down this, the best of the passages I have yet come across in this popular work, and I cannot resist an inclination to muse a little upon the conditions which make it a failure. I hope that I appreciate as much as anyone the great qualities possessed by Mr. Wells for making it a success. He need only, for instance, in this excellent summary of the Middle History of Islam, with its very just and powerful appreciation of the effect upon universal history of the “Asiatic Tide,” have written with detachment to have made it a perfect piece of work; and had he carried a similar detachment with him throughout all his pages he might have done something enduring, or, if not that, at any rate something valuable for his own generation. But his nervous reaction against the Catholic Church is too strong for him, and the result is that the colouring of the picture is all wrong. In proportion as a set of known facts are remote from our own civilization and do not touch upon the philosophy which made us all (including Mr. Wells), in that proportion his judgment is well balanced and his selection sound enough. That is why he is best when he talks of China or Islam, third rate when he talks of his own blood, the European, and quite below the average level of his popular contemporaries when he has to deal with the great debate as to whether religion be from God or from man, and as to whether the Catholic Church be what it claims to be or a maleficent illusion. It is perfectly possible to write enduring and, in a fashion, valuable, historical stuff with as complete a conviction as Mr. Wells himself has that all religion is from mankind, and the Catholic Faith not only man-made, but ill-made. What one cannot do is to write good History under the effect of mere irritation, and exasperated irritation at that. There is between such nervous weakness and a proper balance something comparable to the contrast between the advocacy of a good lawyer and the temper of a touchy witness. The lawyer, though pleading for a false cause, keeps himself, if he knows his trade, detached from the passions of that cause; presents the arguments soberly though cumulatively, throwing stress upon what will achieve his result, but without betraying loss of control. And that is what the historian should do: he should so write that his reader says to himself, “I am reading what actually happened,” and not so that the reader says to himself, “There he is off again at his _bête noire_”!