Political opinions almost always spring from temperament. The conservative temper of such a poet as Sir Walter Scott leads him to idealize the past, and to concern himself but little about the future. The rebellious temperament of such a poet as Shelley leads him to idealize the future, and concern himself but little about the past. But by contriving to idealize both the past and the future, and mixing the two idealizations into one delicious amalgam, the poet of the ‘Earthly Paradise’ gives us the Morrisian socialism, the most charming, and in many respects the most marvellous product of “the poet’s mind” that has ever yet been presented to an admiring world. The plan of ‘John Ball’ is simplicity itself. The poet in a dream becomes a spectator of the insurrection of the Kentish men at the time when Wat Tyler rebelled against the powers that were; and the hero, John Ball, who is mainly famous as having preached a sermon from the text Wan Adam dalf and Eve span Wo was thanne a gentilman? is made to listen to the poet-dreamer’s prophecy of the days of _bourgeois_ rule and the jerry builder. If we take into account the perfect truth and beauty of the literary form in which the story is presented, we do not believe that anything to surpass it could be found in historic fiction; indeed, we do not know that anything could be found to equal it. The difficulty of the imaginative writer who attempts, whether in prose or verse, to vivify the past seems to be increasing, as we have before said, every day with the growth of the scientific temper and the reverence of the sacredness of mere documents. The old-fashioned theory—the theory which obtained from Shakespeare’s time down to Scott’s and even down to Kingsley’s—that the facts of history could be manipulated for artistic purposes with the same freedom that the artist’s own inventions can be handled, gave the artist power to produce vital and flexible work at the expense of the historic conscience—a power which is being curtailed day by day. The instinct for vivifying by imaginative treatment the records of the past is too universal and too deeply inwoven in the very texture of the human mind to be other than a true and healthy instinct. But so oppressive has become the tyranny of documents, so fettered by what a humourist has called “factology” have become the wings of the romancer’s imagination, that one wonders at his courage in dealing with historic subjects at all.