These words call us to the window that opens out upon the past, and they set the mind thinking in pictures; for the mind of every one of us holds a jumble of pictures and stories, shot through, perhaps with sentiment, that constitute what we have built up for ourselves of the Past, and are always ready to be called into play by a glimpse of some old ruin that awakens fine associations, or by a hint of the romantic, such as Wordsworth gives in those lines. A cathedral bell, or the mention of Agincourt, or the very spelling of the word “ycleped” may be enough to send the mind wandering into its own picture-galleries of history, just as the words “Once upon a time--” waft us into the realms of fairy-story; these things are symbols, keys that unlock a world in our minds. Let a Pre-Raphaelite picture remind us of lost fashions or a schoolboy sing “John Peel” and we are bridging the centuries; and only a few key-words are needed to give the mind a clue, and we are with the Elizabethans on the Spanish Main, or with King Harold, defending the gate of England. A hundred things have helped to build up this picture-gallery of history--not merely history-books, but Bible-stories, and local traditions and stories from opera; not merely biographies but the border-ballads that the old gipsies would sing amid grim surroundings, and the rant of politicians who talk of Magna Carta or Nelson, and the picturesque advertisements of magazines and street-posters; out of all these there has grown up a world in our minds and that world is what we make for ourselves of the past. We may try to modify and correct it by our conscious studies, but we cannot escape it. And not the least of the sources of it is the Historical Novel.