Recall the allegories with which mediæval literature abounded. Even the great short stories of Hawthorne, who was much influenced by Bunyan and Spenser, show traces of mediæval forms. Literary tradition is certainly stronger than originality. And the thousands of authors of our day who write novels and short stories, would in mediæval times have written allegories. The ideas and mode of expression change, and hence makes much of the old literature obsolete. But many emotions remain eternal. We can still feel with Sappho and the Troubadours, whereas we find our intellect insulted by some of the religious ideas versified by Dante and Milton; although the passages describing secular emotions win our admiration. When we must look for an author's unconscious buried in the literary trappings of his day we weary of the task and dismiss his work. Why can we not read the thousands of pastorals and allegories of the mediæval writers? Is it not largely because of the feeble intellects, and spirit of imitation present, because of the absence of the personal note? The unconscious is buried too deeply in rigmarole. The works have a psychological and historical but not artistic value. The religious and romantic instincts in many of us are buried too deeply in our unconscious, and hence we do not sympathise with those works. Those poets live who have been most personal. The Roman poets, Horace, Catullus, Titullus, Propertius, Ovid, Lucretius, were personal. Even the _Æneid_ reveals the soul of Virgil in the story of Æneas and Dido. The unconscious is present in all literature, and the literary movement but colours it and gives occasion for the expression or censorship of certain phases of it. Puritan writers are not in their unconscious any different from the "immoral" ones; only the latter relax the censor and give full play to the unconscious, when a liberal age like that of the Restoration or the Renaissance, permits it. Hence, though all writers draw on their unconscious and base their work on their personal repressions, authors of one age differ in manner and substance from those of another, not because the unconscious is different (which it is not), but because it is fashionable to express only certain features of it in one age; because writers have an instinctive tendency to comply with the literary fashions of their age; because the time spirit colours and censors those elements of the unconscious which appear in the literary product. IV