In religion, in politics, in art, in all that makes life beautiful and men true, we must know the past if we would use the present or provide for the future. And our knowledge is barren indeed if it does not touch the intimacies of human existence. What we must know is how men lived and thought, not merely how they acted. We must see them in the home, and not only in the senate or the field. It is thus that the Letters of Erasmus, or Luther's Table Talk, are worth a ton of Sleidan's dreary commentaries or Calvin's systematic theology. And yet we cannot dispense with either. We must study past ages as a whole, and then bring the imagination of the artist and the poet to show us the truth and the passion that lies nearest to their heart. It is thus, then, in history that the imaginary portrait has its valued place. Saturated with contemporary literature, yet alive to the influences of a wider life, the student who is also an artist turns to a great movement, and with the touch of genius fixes the true impression of its soul in poetry, on canvas, or in prose. Such was the work of Walter Pater. He taught us, through the delicate study of a secondary but most alluring painter, to "understand to how great a place in human culture the art of Italy had been called." In his picture of a great scholar and a beautiful, pathetic, childlike soul, he showed the fascination of that priceless truth--that what men have thought and done, that what has interested and charmed them, can never wholly die--"no language they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate or expended time and zeal." And more. He taught us not only how to understand the past, but he showed us how it understood itself. "A Prince of Court Painters"--Watteau, as he was seen by one who loved him, by a sympathetic woman--like all such, the keenest of critics, yet the tenderest of hearts--is given to us as not even pictures or personal letters could give. Sebastian van Storck, Duke Carl of Rosenmold--they are portraits, though it is only imagination that makes them live. I remember Mr. Freeman once saying to me, as he took me his favourite walk at Somerleaze, that he had read a study of Mr. Pater's--a strange mediæval story of Denys l'Auxerrois--and could not be satisfied till he knew what it meant. Was it true? It was a question befitting one who had made the past to live again. Truth was the first, almost the only, thing the historian prized. Denys the organ-builder may never have watched the decoration of the Cathedral of Saint Étienne, or made, by the mere sight of him, the old feel young again. And yet Walter Pater had painted a true portrait, as so often did Robert Browning, though it were imaginary; and the artist as well as the historian had imaged for us the reality of a past age.