with his innumerable followers in all countries. (This literary form was therefore quite different from the historical fiction of Manzoni, which is free from such sentiment and whose historical element has a moral foundation.) I have already remarked that this nostalgia was far more modern of content than at first supposed; so much so that every one was attracted to it by the motive that most appealed to himself, whether religious or political, Old Catholic, mystical, monarchical, constitutional, communal-republican, national-independent, liberal-democratic, or aristocratic. Nevertheless, when the past was taken as a poetic theme, there was a risk that the idealizing tendency of the images would be at strife with critical reflection: hence the cult of the Middle Ages, which had become a superstition, came to a ridiculous end. Fueter quotes an acute remark of Ranke, relating to one of the last worthy representatives of the romantic school, Giesebrecht, author of the History of the German Empire, admirer and extoller of the 'Christian-Germanic virtues,' of the power and excellence of the medieval heroes. Ranke described all this as "at once too virile and too puerile." But the puerility discernible at the sources of this ideal current, before it falls into the comic, is rather the sublime puerility of the poet's dream. The actual modern motives, which present themselves as sentiments in nostalgic historiography, acquired a reflex form with the same or other writers, as tendencies to the service of which their narratives were bent. Here, too, it would be superfluous to give an account of all the various forms and specifications of these tendencies (which Fueter has already done admirably), from the persistent Rousseauism of Giovanni Müller to Sismondi, or from the ideal of a free peasantry of Niebuhr, the ultramontane ideal of Leo, the imperialistic-medieval ideal of the already mentioned Giesebrecht and Ficker, the old liberal of Raumer, the neo-liberal of Rotteck and Gervinus, the anglicizing of Guizot and Dahlmann, or the democratic ideal of Michelet, to the neo-Guelfish ideal of Troya and Balbo and Father Tosti, to the Prussian hegemony of Droysen and of Treitschke, and so on. But all of these, and other historians with a particular bias, lean, with rare exceptions, on the past, and find the justification of their bias in the dialectic of tradition or in tradition itself. Nobody any longer cared to compose by the light of abstract reason alone. The extreme typical instance is afforded by the socialistic school, which took the romantic form in the person of its chief representative, Marx, who endowed it with historiographical and scientific value. His work was in complete opposition to the socialistic ideals that had appeared in the eighteenth century, and he therefore boasted that they had passed from the state of being a Utopia to that of a science. His science was nothing less than historical necessity attributed to the new era