12. As far as I can observe, it is a constant law, that the greatest men, whether poets or historians, live entirely in their own age, and the greatest fruits of their work are gathered out of their own age. Dante paints Italy in the thirteenth century; Chaucer, England in the fourteenth; Masaccio, Florence in the fifteenth; Tintoret, Venice in the sixteenth; all of them utterly regardless of anachronism and minor error of every kind, but getting always vital truth out of the vital present. If it be said that Shakespeare wrote perfect historical plays on subjects belonging to the preceding centuries, I answer that they _are_ perfect plays, just because there is no care about centuries in them, but a life which all men recognise for the human life of all time--and this it is, not because Shakespeare sought to give universal truth, but because painting, honestly and completely, from the men about him, he painted that human nature which is indeed constant enough,--a rogue in the fifteenth century being _at heart_ what a rogue is in the nineteenth, and was in the twelfth; and an honest or knightly man being in like manner very similar to other such at any other time. And the work of these great idealists is, therefore, always universal; not because it is not _portrait_, but because it is _complete_ portrait, down to the heart, which is the same in all ages; and the work of the mean idealists is _not_ universal, not because it is portrait, but because it is _half_ portrait--of the outside, the manners and the dress, not of the heart. Thus Tintoret and Shakespeare paint, both of them, simply Venetian and English nature, as they saw it in their time, down to the root; and it does for _all_ time; but as for any care to cast themselves into the particular ways and tones of thought, or custom, of past time in their historical work, you will find it in neither of them,[8] nor in any other perfectly great man that I know of. [8] What vestige of Egyptian character is there, for instance, in Cleopatra?--of Athenian in Theseus or Timon?--of old English in Imogen or Cordelia?--of old Scottish in Macbeth?--or even of mediaeval Italian in Petruchio, the Merchant of Venice, or Desdemona? And the Roman plays appear definitely Roman only because the strength of Rome was the eternal strength of the world,--pure family life, sustained by agriculture, and defended by simple and fearless manhood.