But it is above all in romantic historiography that we observe the search for and very often the happy realization of an organic linking together of all particular histories of spiritual values, by relating religious, philosophical, poetical, artistic, juridical, and moral facts as a function of a single motive of development. It then becomes a commonplace that a literature cannot be understood without understanding ideas and customs, or politics without philosophy, or (as was realized rather later) rights and customs and ideas without economy. And it is worth while recording as we pass by that there is hardly one of these histories of values which has not been previously presented or sketched by Vico, together with the indication of their intrinsic unity. Histories of poetry, histories of myth, of rights, of languages, of constitutions, of explicative or philosophical reason, all are in Vico, although sometimes wrapped up in the historical or sociological epoch with which each one of them was particularly connected. Even modern biography (which illustrates what the individual does and suffers in relation to the mission which he fulfils and to the aspect of the Idea which becomes actual in him) has its first or one of its first notable monuments in the autobiography of Vico--that is to say, in the history of the works which Providence commanded and guided him to accomplish "in diverse ways that seemed to be obstacles, but were opportunities." This transformation of biography does not imply failure to recognize individuality, but is, on the contrary, its elevation, for it finds its true meaning in its relation with the universal, as the universal its concreteness in the individual. And indeed individualizing power, perception of physiognomies, of states of the soul, of the various forms of the ideas, sense of the differences of times and places, may be said to show themselves for the first time in romantic historiography. That is to say, they do not show themselves rarely or as by accident, nor any longer in the negative and summary form of opposition between new and old, civil and barbarous, patriotic and extraneous. It does not mean anything that some of those historians lost themselves (though this happened rarely) in an abstract dialectic of ideas, and that others more frequently allowed ideas to be submerged in the external picturesqueness of customs and anecdotes, because we find exaggerations, one-sidedness, lack of balance, at all periods and in all progress of thought. Nor is the accusation of great importance that the colouring of times and places preferred by the romantics was false, because the important thing was precisely this attempt to colour, whether the result were happy or the reverse (if the latter, the picture had to be coloured again, but always coloured). A further reason for this is that, as has been already admitted, there were fancies and tendencies at work in romanticism beyond true and proper