The men and women who walked the earth in the days of its youth are not antiquated: the up-to-date young men and the modern young women are the real old fogies, for they are the tenants of the world’s old age, the products of the most ancient phase of the human story. To the Past we must go as a relief from To-day’s harshness; for the Past is spread out before us as a children’s garden, where jolly laughter and sudden, quick-ended tears are to be experienced; where the waters are alive with mermen and the woods are filled with brownies; where nymphs and fairies dwell among the flowers, and enchanted castles crown the hilltops; where heroes die for fame, and the victors marry kings’ daughters. There in that garden we may forget the mature cruelty and the sins of the present time; for if there be wickedness in the Past, we may usually name it the thoughtless mischief of childhood. One contemplates with positive relief the tortures and massacres of the distant ages, for they are child’s play as compared with the reasoned brutality of these wicked olden days in which we now live. How pleasant it is to turn from the organised beastliness of our own times to the irresponsible slaughter of the early Christians in Rome or to the wholesale impalings and flayings which followed an Assyrian battle! In the last-named cases we are but shocked at the suffering inflicted by the inhabitants of the world’s nursery upon one another; but in the other we are appalled by the spectacle of humanity’s old men gleefully slaughtering one another. The historian should always remember that by rights it is to the days of long ago that he and his readers ought to turn for those scenes which make their special appeal to the ardent eyes of youth. It is into the early times that we must all wander when, sick of life’s conformity and weary of the cramped stiffness of the conventions amongst which we move, we would breathe the unenclosed air of a freer order of things. He must not, therefore, amidst the stately forest of his phrases hide the gateway of this joyous domain both from himself and his followers. It should stand open and unconcealed at the end of the highroad which leads from the Present to the Past; so that all those who make the great adventure and set out in search of the forgotten years shall, by his direction, find that gateway and pass through it into the land where the burden of To-day’s old age drops from the shoulders and the buoyancy of the early times stimulates and enlivens.