In the first two books, where he was dealing with the world before Man, and Man before History, he went by such textbooks as he had come across (all of them anti-Catholic, few or none of them continental, and most of them old-fashioned stuff thirty or forty years old, the theories of which are to-day, for the most part, exploded). He filled up the gaps with guesswork, rather confused, even contradictory, and often in direct conflict with the evidence—had he known or noticed what the evidence was. He romanced, and he romanced out of the map. The world he saw in his vivid imagination was an unreal world, much as the English aristocratic world of a popular novel is an unreal world comically unlike the thing itself. But when it comes to real and tangible stuff, record and monument, and still better, record in writing—in other words, when it comes to real History—Mr. Wells’s excellent qualities as a writer appear in a much better light and are put to a much better purpose. His narrative, which even in its misshapen prehistoric part was lucid, vivid and well put, capable of holding the reader’s attention, retains all these characters, and now becomes in great sections really informing without distortion. There is also a very successful packing of a great deal of information into a short space without redundancy of detail and without too much repetition. The order is well observed, and the survey is as wide as the Author intended it to be—that is, world-wide. Unfortunately, in this second part of Mr. Wells’s account, he cannot help suffering from the disabilities of the modern industrial town world, under which he naturally labours. He has never experienced the great part played by popular memory and impressions handed down from one generation to another, as the counterpart and corrector of documentary Record. He is, therefore, too prone to treat what is handed down by masses of men living familiarly in neighbourhood (they still do so in our villages) as being, on its large lines and in its general sense, misleading; whereas it is, on its large lines and in its general sense, true. He has no appreciable knowledge of the Catholic Church, and, therefore, does not know how History falls into line under that philosophy which alone properly explains it. He also suffers, as we shall see, from that unfortunate tendency to violent personal hatred for the nobler things, especially for the great and united succession of civilization in Europe: Tradition.