The other main service rendered by Goldsmith was his return to the historical method. It is true that his knowledge is no more at first hand, and is set out with still less system than that of Dryden a century before. But it is also true that he has a far keener sense of the strength which art may draw from history than his great forerunner. Dryden confines himself to the history of certain forms of art; Goldsmith includes the history of nations also in his view. With Dryden the past is little more than an antiquarian study; with Goldsmith it is a living fountain of inspiration for the present. The art of the past--the poetry, say, of Teutonic or Celtic antiquity--is to him an undying record of the days when man still walked hand in hand with nature. The history of the past is at once a storehouse of stirring themes ready to the hand of the artist, and the surest safeguard against both flatness and exaggeration in his work. [Footnote: See Essays xiii., xiv., xx.; _Present State of Polite Learning_, in particular, chap. xi.] It offers, moreover, the truest schooling of the heart, and insensibly "enlists the passions on the side of humanity". "Poetry", Byron said, "is the feeling of a former world, and future"; [Footnote: Moore's _Life_, p. 483] and to the first half of the statement Goldsmith would have heartily subscribed. For the historical method in his hands is but another aspect of the counsel he gave to Gray: "Study the people". It is an anticipation--vague, no doubt, but still unmistakable--of the spirit which, both in France and England, gave birth to the romantic movement a generation or two later.