When we read or think about the past, what images actually form in our minds? Take the average American, for instance. He probably has two sets of such images and no more. One is of bunchy persons in preposterous garments—something between a toga and a burnoose—moving over the garish landscape of a Sunday-school card. The other is of heroic gentlemen in the blue-and-buff of the American Revolution, with powdered wigs and elaborate manners, either engaging in battle or else dancing minuets with the furbelowed dames who, like their gallants, abound in the illustrations of the old-fashioned history books. As the blue-and-buff habiliments represent actually a very brief period of history, and those of the Sunday-school pictures none at all, this is but a scanty wardrobe for the imagination. And in matters not quite so sartorial, things are little better. There are probably only a few persons alive anywhere who can sit down and assemble anything like an accurate mental picture of a street in Athens or Rome or Florence or Paris or London or Weimar or Philadelphia, even in the days which mean most and are consequently most studied in the history of those cities. We have generally but the vaguest notions of the physiognomy of the ancients, or even of the remoter moderns. We cannot actually visualize them at their meals, at their work, at their relaxations. If this is the case now, when we possess libraries of archaeology to draw upon if we care to, what was the case before illustrated books had become common? To judge by the paintings of the Middle Ages, the past then was visualized as merely like the present in its outward details. On the Elizabethan stage the Greeks and Romans were set forth pretty much after the fashions contemporary with the audiences. And even far down through the eighteenth century this custom prevailed. Garrick acted Lear in breeches and wig and nobody minded. It is certain that, while many in his audience would have known better if they had been questioned, they did not experience the shock that we should feel. Lear belonged to an age about which the eighteenth century readers knew little. They were, however, hardly more exact in their images of the Greek and Roman past. Examine, for instance, the illustrations of Pope’s Homer, completed a little over two hundred years ago. It was issued in a magnificent folio with elaborate plates. The frontispiece to the second volume, “Troja cum Locis pertingentibus,” aims to exhibit the plains of Troy, with the sea in the foreground and at the back the city itself. It is true that the ships have slightly Grecian prows, and the warriors on the plains fight with bows and spears and shields and chariots. But the citadel towers above the surrounding houses suspiciously as does St. Paul’s above the City of London. The landscape rolls across the page with the soft curves of England. Here and there are English hedgerows, and the brooks and mountains, so far