Greater, perhaps, even than his grasp of the singular entirety of mediaeval civilization, is Mr. Adams's power of merging himself in a long dead time, of thinking and feeling with the men and women thereof, and so breathing on the dead bones of antiquity that again they clothe themselves with flesh and vesture, call back their severed souls, and live again, not only to the consciousness of the reader, but before his very eyes. And it is not a thin simulacrum he raises by some doubtful alchemy: it is no phantasm of the past that shines dimly before us in these magical pages; it is the very time itself in which we are merged. We forgather with the Abbot and his monks, and the crusaders and pilgrims in the Shrine of the Archangel: we pay our devoirs to the fair French Queens,--Blanche of Castile, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Mary of Champagne,--fighting their battles for them as liege servants: we dispute with Abelard, Thomas of Aquino, Duns the Scotsman: we take our parts in the Court of Love, or sing the sublime and sounding praises of God with the Canons of Saint Victor: our eyes opened at last, and after many days we kneel before Our Lady of Pity, asking her intercession for her lax but loyal devotees. Seven centuries dissolve and vanish away, being as they were not, and the thirteenth century lives less for us than we live in it and are a part of its gaiety and light- heartedness, its youthful ardour and abounding action, its childlike simplicity and frankness, its normal and healthy and all-embracing devotion. And it is well for us to have this experience. Apart from the desirable transformation it effects in preconceived and curiously erroneous superstitions as to one of the greatest eras in all history, it is vastly heartening and exhilarating. If it gives new and not always flattering standards for the judgment of contemporary men and things, so does it establish new ideals, new goals for attainment. To live for a day in a world that built Chartres Cathedral, even if it makes the living in a world that creates the "Black Country" of England or an Iron City of America less a thing of joy and gladness than before, equally opens up the far prospect of another thirteenth century in the times that are to come and urges to ardent action toward its attainment.