Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/353



CHAPTER XV.

THE HEADLESS REBELLION.

HE true fascination of history, whether it be the history of a race or of an individual, of a national government or of a moral revolution, is never realised until we have made a prolonged and laborious effort to reconstruct what time has buried in the dust. When at last, with patient toil and keen imagination, the student has succeeded in reaching a point from which it is possible to see, not the sheer realities, but the types and tendencies and probabilities of a half-forgotten age, he begins for the first time to understand the satisfaction of the traveller who has struck into an unknown land, or of the explorer who has laid bare the tombs and temples of an ancient civilisation. 281