the status of woman, and the education of children, with the opinions, practically current without material change since the dawn of history, in 1800, to perceive the truth of this statement; and the change of attitude on the part of civilised people, outside the Roman Catholic Church (and, to some extent, even within it), towards religion is not less remarkable. An enlightened man of the present day is so radically different in all his ideas from a similar individual of the early nineteenth century, that it is hardly possible for a modern student to write with any intelligence on the deeper significance of events and life prior to 1800. Grotesquely inadequate as most historical novels of our own day are, they are perhaps hardly less inadequate than our own understanding of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott could probably write of crusaders and the age of chivalry without committing serious blunders of sentiment. What the world thought in the age of Saladin the world practically thought in the age of Napoleon. But the irresistible infection of modern ideas has made it hardly possible for us to enter with any fulness into the sentiments of Scott; and the sentiments put into the mouth, and the thoughts into the mind, of the hero of any historical novel of our own day would be utterly incomprehensible to that hero, could he by some miracle be resuscitated, and could we translate them literally to him. We unconsciously endow the personages of our historical fiction with ideas for which they had not even the names.