(_γ_) We have here struck the very note we wish particularly to emphasize. We have already remarked that there are two essential conditions to any effective presentation of a real personality; we must have before us both the reflection of the man's inner life and the natural environment which surrounds him. And in order that this external surrounding appear as one that is truly his own an essential bond of relation must be established between him and it, one which to a greater or less degree is part of his own spiritual substance, where we may, doubtless, cross many traces of contingent matter and yet find the spiritual bed of this nexus still maintained. Throughout the entire spiritual _apparatus_ of the heroes of Epic poetry, for example, their mode of life, that is, opinions, emotions, and all that they do we ought to be able to recognize a subtle homogeneousness, a harmonious _en rapport_, which fuses the two aspects of such a life into one concordant whole. The Arab is thus united with Nature, and, indeed, apart from his sky, his stars, his torrid deserts, his tents, his camels, and his horses is unintelligible. He is only truly himself and at home under such conditions. In the same way the heroes of Ossian possess in the highest degree an intense inward life; but in their very gloominess and melancholy they appear as the genuine growth of their hills of heather, whose thistles are swept by the wind, of their rain-clouds, mists, mountains, and dark caves. The physiognomy of the conditions under which they live reveals to us as nothing else can the secret of that inner life of emotion which is lived through with all its sadness, mourning, its pains, its battles, and its mist-like apparitions in such a natural setting; they are, in short, entirely at home in it and in it alone. Such considerations supply us with ample ground for the statement we let fall previously unsupported that the subject-matter of history offers unrivalled opportunities for perfecting this intimate relation between the two aspects of human life we have been discussing, and enabling, us to carry the same directly into the minutest particulars. Very rarely, indeed, are we likely to find that the imagination can simply through its own initiative create such a harmony, although we ought to feel its presence throughout, however little it may, in fact, have produced of the raw material it combines into artistic completeness. No doubt there is a common tendency to rate what we fancy is the free creation of imaginative genius above the effort of assimilating in artistic form a material which is borrowed; but it is for all that quite impossible that the imagination should alone create that harmonious _entente_, the unity of the Ideal requires in the consistent and defined form which lies before us in actual existence, where national traits, to cite the examples above, are the veritable growth of such a harmony.