The everyday topic which makes man "the creature of his time" derives whatever truth it possesses from this unity, but Sophocles did not write the _Ajax_ because Miltiades fought at Marathon, nor Tirso, _El Condennado_ because Cortez defeated Montezuma. Whatever law connect greatness in art and greatness in action, it is not the law of cause and effect, of necessary succession in time. They are the mutually dependent manifestations of the same immortal energy which uplifts the whole State, whose motions arise from beyond Time, the roots of whose being are beyond the region of cause and effect. Consider now as an illustration of the interdependence of the soul of the individual and of the State, and of the immanence in each of the Divine, the relation which world-history reveals as existing between the higher manifestations of the life of the individual and of the State. The greatest achievements of individual men, whether in action, or in art, or in thought, are, it will generally be found, coincident with, and synchronous with, the highest form which in its development the State assumes, that is, with some form or mode of empire. For it is not merely the art of Phidias, of Sophocles, that springs from the energy aroused by the Persian invasions; the energy which finds expression in the Empire of Athens is to be traced thither, empire and art arising from the same exaltation of the State and of the individual. But they are not related as cause and effect, nor is the art of Sophocles _caused_ by Marathon; but the _Agamemnon_ and Salamis, the Parthenon and the _Ajax_, are incarnations in words, in deeds, or in marble of the divine Idea immanent in the whole race of the Hellenes. A race capable of empire, the civic form of imperialism, thus arises simultaneously with its greatest achievements in art. Similarly in the civic State of mediaeval Florence, the age of Leonardo and of Savonarola is also the age of Lorenzo, when in politics Florence competes with Venice and the Borgias for the hegemony of Italy, and the actual bounds of her civic empire are at their widest. So in Venetian history empire and art reach their height together, and the age which succeeds that of Giorgione and of Titian is an end not only to the painting but to the political greatness of Venice. As in civic so in national empires. In Spain, Charles V and the Philips are the tyrants of the greatest single military power and of the first nation of the earth, and have as their subjects Rojas and Tirso, Lope and Cervantes, Calderon and Velasquez. Racine and Molière serve _le grand Monarque_, as Apelles served Alexander. The mariners who sketched the bounds of this empire, which is at last attaining to the full consciousness of its mighty destinies, were the contemporaries of Marlowe and Webster, of Beaumont and Ford.