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198 often enough caught up in the swirl of contemporary interests, and played an eager part in that making of contemporary history which we call politics. How many works of art do we not owe to the civic consciousness, to a man's pride in his own place, his desire to be worthy of it, his sense of comradeship and his glory in communal service? In every city worthy of the name, in every city that is anything more than an enlarged manufacturing slum, there stands, in brick or stone, some witness to the force and reality of the communal impulse in art. It was an impulse that seldom reached woman; who stood apart from the communal life, who knew not the service that brings with it sense of fellowship, who had not so much as a place to be proud of. Even to-day a woman takes her husband's nationality, and the place that was her own is hers no longer. She has drawn no inspiration from the thought that she is a citizen of no mean city.

We think of Milton as a poet; but to the men of his time he was something else. Twenty years of his life were given to politics and statecraft, and his verse is the product not only of