Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/129

 I may use such an expression, inclines me to a protest. Like the man in Terence, I say 'Humani nil a me alienum puto;' I have a sympathy with the struggles of the struggling ages, with the weariness of the weary ages, with the faith of the ages of faith, with the controversies of the ages of controversy, with the changes of the ages of change, with the light of the ages of illumination, with the darkness of the dark ages themselves. Nay, I am not sure that I may not some day have to profess myself a convert to the Unity of History and the Education of the World. For after all, human life is not essentially changed by railways or excise, or newspapers, or even by the property tax: the people before the flood ate and drank, married and were given in marriage, planted and builded; still Jacob finds his Rachel at the well, and David and Jonathan make their covenant together, and David mourns for Absalom. Natural selection, and the survival of the fittest, have not done away with sin and sorrow, and, whatever evolution may have done in the producing of new types, those new types have not swept away the old. To go beyond and behind the ancients, what else do we find in Egypt, Babylon and Nineveh, in Japan, and in the China of immemorial sameness? And as there is no history in which we do not find a sympathy, there is none in which we may not find a lesson.

But to put aside generalities; the two or three truisms which I have uttered, and the subject which I have chosen for these two lectures, are alike suggested by the discussion which we have seen recently carried on by Mr. Freeman and Mr. Froude on the subject of Thomas Becket. I am not going to interfere in a struggle between two such combatants, nor shall I again refer to either of them, but the opposite lights in which those two champions approach the common subject, shed some rays on the fashion of thought which marks not only the two writers, or the two schools of which they may be supposed to be the disciples, but the two ways of looking at the middle ages which divide cultivated men of the present day. And I have thought that I might, in attempting to sketch the literary life of an age, on which