“You are right,” said Lionel. “Still, posterity, in her impartial summing up, will be more lenient towards those whose crimes were the results of unpolished ignorance, than towards those whose lust was cleverly screened by Pharisaism. It will not be hard on Edward III. and Philippe le Bel for haggling over France like two butcher’s dogs over a bone; but I am afraid it will judge unmercifully our modern civilisations which masqueraded and played parts unsuited to them. Has the Hundred Years’ War given the supremacy to either France or England? What has the Inquisition and the Spanish ascendency over the Dutch Republic done for Spain’s prosperity?” “And what would the annexation of the South African Provinces have done for England’s glory, had not the storm put a sudden stop to his country’s hysterical fits?” inquired Danford. “Our old world has gone through a good deal of alteration,” remarked Sinclair. “Maps have always impressed me as the saddest annals of history. As a boy, I used to turn the pages of atlas books with the keenest interest; they spoke to me of human struggles, of longings and morbid regrets.” “Yes,” added Danford, “maps are the medical charts of the intermittent fevers from which countries suffer.” “Thank God for the blessings His water-spout has conferred on us!” burst out Lionel. “I shudder when I think that we might, on this very day, have witnessed this fantastic pageantry. The opium-eater, in his weirdest delirium, could not have pictured a more uncanny parade, than the one we should have beheld at the dawn of the twentieth century: London—a huge pawnbroker’s shop—turning out into the streets all its pandemonium! the properties of our modern world thrown together, higgledy-piggledy, with the paraphernalia of a Cinderella pantomime! The incongruous was then the order of the day, and our brains, before the storm, were the receptacles of untidy ideas.” “My lord, do you hear in the distance the bells of St Paul’s ringing their peals?” “Yes, they are ringing for the sacred union of clericalism with worldly wisdom.” “How could we reconcile the symbolic ceremony of a crowned monarch with the limitations of our constitution?” asked Danford. “How was it possible to adapt obsolete palliaments to the democratic innovation of the coat and skirt? For I think we may truly call this revolution in feminine dress the 1789 of Histology.” “You are right, my dear Dan, but I want to know what our epoch was aiming at?” asked Sinclair, sitting down on one of the steps. “Was it playing a practical joke on democracy, or was it acting a monarchical burlesque? What had our fashionable metropolis to do with the customs of a London which began at the Strand, and whose centre was the Tower? Doubtless, the auditory faculty of a Plantagenet would have suffered from the bustling London of Edward VII., and the clamouring noise of a railway station would have certainly upset the nerves of even that bloodthirsty Richard III.”