For, to repeat a metaphor already used, Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_ may be compared to one of those vivid profile charcoal sketches which we had in the music-halls of his youth and mine: to a vivid charcoal sketch of Mr. Gladstone’s profile, for instance—but presented to the audience as that of Queen Victoria. The drawing is rapid, firm, accurate, successful—but it is startlingly unlike the original. It remains true that if the draughtsman had known reality well enough he would have done useful and permanent work in this field. He would have been a leader instead of a follower. As he has a wide public he would have given the average men of his own tongue a view of the past which would have rung true, and he would have been confirmed by every new fact as he accumulated experience. Unfortunately, he was given by those on whom he relied a view of the past which is already badly out of date and necessarily doomed to be forgotten in a few years. Seeing how remarkable his talents are, and how he might have used them, it is a very great pity indeed. CHAPTER VII MR. WELLS ON PRIESTHOOD When a man is talking of a social class whereof he knows nothing, you will notice that he does two things. First of all, he goes very much by the current statements about it which he has seen in print or on the stage: what he has met in the books and plays he happens to come across. Baronets are wicked, Dukes haughty, great Ladies disdainful and dazzlingly fair. Next, his imagination plays on that unknown world, creates out of the void, and then takes for granted a number of habits in it which are, as a fact, nonexistent and wholly of his own imagining: as, for instance, Cabinet Ministers wielding awful power in whispered conclaves. But when he comes to talking of his own world, of his own class, of the things he really knows, his manner changes altogether. He becomes, for one thing, much more interesting, and, for another, much more definite. In _that_ region, one can judge his style and credentials by real standards. Something like this change from romance and misjudgment to appreciation and reason takes place in Mr. Wells’s book when he turns from what is called to-day “Pre-history” (of which we know hardly anything) to recorded History (of which we know a great deal, and which is in a totally different category). This change takes place in Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_ with the opening of Book III.