as they have any vraisemblance at all, are of English make. Quaint and incredible! But what chance, after all, had the illustrator for knowing better? Not for a generation did the excavations begin at Herculaneum and Pompeii or Winckelmann begin the great career which taught the world to think of the ancients very much in their true proportions, though not in their true colours or movements. The fact of the matter is that the Renaissance and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, spiritual great-grandchildren of Greece and Rome and worshippers of their ancestors, did not really know what their ancestors looked like. Yet in those ages a great and truthful art grew out of that worship. The moral seems to be that we lean very little upon definite images in our imagination of the past. The vaguest images will do for most people. Even when we deal with more recent periods and have striking illustrations to help us out, such as Hogarth’s for his age, or those of Phiz for Dickens and Ainsworth, or those of the too-much-neglected F. O. C. Darley for the old American frontier, we probably depend less upon them than we think. We create our favoured personages from history or fiction in our own image. Let any reader of an historical novel, even of so incomparably vivid a series of pictures as _Salammbô_, examine himself as he reads, and the chances are he will find that, having seized upon a few mental or moral traits of the characters, he follows them by this scent and hardly notices their outward appearances again, any more than he carefully visualizes the landscape, much pleasure as he may take from its presence in the action. Such an examination is likely to show, on simple psychological grounds, that Lessing has not been wholly superseded in his doctrine of the true provinces of poetry and art. It is likely also to make us ask whether the Imagists, exquisite lyrics and vivid episodes as they have produced, can ever by images alone build up any great or sustained illusion of events really transacted in something like a real world. THE GREAT LABORATORY