The love of the past for its own sake, and the fondness for lingering over those things that endure as relics or as symbols of the past, and the regret for the things that are lost for ever are what one might call romanticism. Gibbon and Gregorovius had this feeling when the sight of the splendid ruins and remains of Rome drove them, each in turn, to look into the story that lay behind monument and masonry, and to be writers of history. All of us have this feeling when the glimpse of some historic town, or the impressive sternness of an old castle, or the sight of a Roman wall, awakens a world in our minds, and sets us thinking on all the tales that stone could tell if only it could speak the history that it stores. These buildings and remains are the maimed survivals, the broken emblems, of a vivid thrilling life that has been lived, and that we love to look back upon. Distance lends enchantment, and the things of long-ago draw us with their strangeness, and with a far-away, picturesque glamour that surrounds them; and there is just the escape that we seek from modern life, in the possibility that we have of thinking ourselves into a different world, which we can suffuse with a romantic glow and which we can think of as having more colour and adventure than our own world. But, most of all, the reason why we love the ruins of an abbey, and preserve the flags that are riddled with the bullets of Waterloo--the reason why we prize the book in the margins of which Coleridge himself scribbled pencil-notes of literary criticism, and keep a lock of Keats’s hair, is that these things are like the stray flowers that cheat the scythe or like the last stars that outdare the morning sun; they are the few things that are saved from a shipwreck. The work of a historian is to reconstruct the past out of the debris that is cast up by the sea from the wrecks of countless ages.