And just as he enters into the things that conditioned the thinking of these men of former days, the novelist in a larger way fits life to the things which conditioned their experience, and moves within the framework of the age. It is the same human nature all the time, which he is describing, but it comes in different disguises, and is always finding fresh symbols for itself, fresh forms for its expression. The same essential fact, the same inner experience, takes different turns in its unfolding. The boy who runs away to escape the drudgery near at hand may be the same in every century; but to-day it will be the dullness of school-routine that brings unrest and the cinema that brings incitement; while in some bygone age it would be the cruelty of apprentice-life that became unbearable, and tales of high adventure on the Spanish Main that made the world inviting. This would lead to a different wayfaring. It is a fresh story altogether. Love may be ever the same but it will not blossom out into the identical facts, it will not raise the same issues, it will not lure to the same adventures, altogether it will not unfold its story in the same way, in various worlds of convention. The novelist who knows the experience must weave it to the pattern and run it into the mould of the century with which he is dealing, he must fit it to the machinery of life as it then was, he must translate it into the terms of the age. Present experience, in so far as it is eternal experience, can be referred back to a different world, where even to the farthest detail of its working it will run into different forms; and the facility, the inevitability with which this is done, so that you do not find a modern love-story transplanted into alien soil, patched into an old tapestry, set in a mere background of mediaeval staging and dress, but the whole theme overhauled with insistent reference to the conditioning features of the age, by a mind that has not wearied of playing upon the implications of these things--is one of the things which make the age as reproduced in the novel come to us with conviction, and with atmosphere. Perhaps the lack of this constant way of running back to the past in thinking till everything has been remoulded is what makes _The Cloister and the Hearth_ fail in atmosphere, and seem like a story of modern convention merely clothed in an old-world dress and staged in mediaeval setting, without coming as a live blossoming of mediaeval life. It is recalled in Henry James’s _Notes on Novelists_ how Robert Louis Stevenson made Edinburgh his “own.” And this (we are told) even in spite of continual absence--in virtue of a constant imaginative reference and an intense intellectual possession.