So in the history of Islam, from the anguish and struggles of the eighth century, the Islam of Haroun and Mutasim arises, imparting even to dying Persia, as it were, a second prime, by the wisdom and imaginative justice of its sway. In the development of Imperial Britain, the conflict which in the life-history of these two States, Athens and Rome, has its essential agony at Cannae or at Syracuse, the conflict which affects the national consciousness as the hour of tragic insight affects the individual life, finds its parallel in the fifteenth century. After the short-lived glory of Agincourt and the vain coronation at Paris, humiliation follows humiliation, calamity follows calamity. The empire purchased by the war of a century is lost in a day; and England's chivalry, as if stung to madness by the magnitude of the disaster, turns its mutilating swords, like Paris after Sedan, against itself. The havoc of civil war prolongs the rancour and the shame of foreign defeat, so that Rheims, Chatillon, Wakefield, Barnet, and Tewkesbury, with other less remembered woes, seem like moments in one long tempest of fiery misery that breaks over England, stilled at last in the desperate lists at Bosworth. This period neglected, perhaps wisely neglected, by the political historian, is yet the period to which we must turn for the secret sources of that revolution in its political character which, furthered by the incidents that fortune reserved for her, has gradually fashioned out of the England of the Angevins the Imperial Britain of to-day. In England it is possible to trace the operation of this transforming power, which I have compared to the transforming power of tragedy, in a very complete manner. It reveals itself, for instance, in two different modes or aspects, which, for the sake of clearness, may be dealt with separately. In the first of these aspects, deeply and permanently affecting the national consciousness, which as we have seen is distinct from the sum of the units composing it, the law of tragedy appears as the influence of suffering, of "terror" in the mystic transcendental sense of the word, of reverent fear, yet with it, serene and dauntless courage. This influence now makes itself felt in English politics, in English religion, in English civic life.