Lastly, it may be said that the inspiration of the historical novel is not merely history, but also geography. To a person for whom history did not exist at all a landscape would be merely a flat picture; to one who can think history into it, it has a dimension in time. To some people the ruins of Rome may be a poor heap of fragments, pieces of broken art-ware; but to Gibbon and Gregorovius who brought to the place a sense of the history behind, those ruins were the starting-point of a trail that led back to the glories of ancient Rome and were the clue to a story. If people re-tread the scenes of a distant childhood it is not merely a flat picture that comes before their eyes, but other scenes behind it, scenes that the memory has stored and that are somehow locked up in the present one; the very landscape looks different, and is richer because it breathes the past. To an architect a building is not merely a dead weight of stone, but a mass of forces striking in different directions and brought somehow to a poise; the whole structure is thrilled with life and in every line of it there is motion. To a historical mind similarly, a building must _look_ different. It has not merely length and breadth and height, but also a certain “throughness,” an extension in time; behind the “Now” of that building there is a long trail of Moments of the same building, the place has not merely a few associations with the past but a whole context in history; and the sight of the walls at the present time is only the last picture of a cinematograph-reel which represents all the hundred Yesterdays that are folded up within the stone. Our fleeting “Now” is only the last term of an ever-lengthening series. Time is locked up within scenery and buildings; and the aim of history is to unlock it and to make it speak its secret. What we call historic sites and buildings represent places in which this secret has in some measure been recovered. They have not existed longer than other places in geography, but they are places about which History can remember things. The cinematograph-film which represents their extension in time is not completely locked away from us; and the historical mind means among other things the power to feel the film there and to recall pictures in it at the mere sight of the place, on the mere suggestion of geography. In Sir Walter Scott this power of reading history into places existed in real intensity. To me (he said) the wandering over the field of Bannockburn was the source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing upon the celebrated landscape from the battlement of Stirling Castle. I do not by any means infer that I was dead to the feeling or picturesque scenery--but show me an old castle in a field of battle and I was at home at once.... If he saw a scene about which tradition or the history-book had nothing to tell, he still saw the history there, and tried to read the past into the place. Someone wrote of him: