Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/98

 to read modern history from its own starting-point, I will observe, and content myself with observing, first that there are no doubt political thoughts common to ancient and modern life; nay more, that, as has been said, there is very much that is modern in ancient history and much that is ancient in modern history; and yet that that very element of continuity on which the whole discussion hangs is wanting. There may be, I will not say there is, a certain similarity of thought in a leading article of The Times and a chapter in Thucydides: the similarity of the circumstances of two political crises may bring out parallels and coincidences; Constantinople may be the Athens, Alexander II the Xerxes of the day, and anyhow the Bosphorus must be pretty nearly where it was. But the connexion of the political ideas is one of coincidence and not of continuity; there is not even the life that germinates in the grains of wheat found in Egyptian mummy-pits. Every factor is new, even the area, the nationality of the actors, the whole idea in its origin and every stage of growth is new. Or let the area be the same; what has modern Greece in continuity with ancient Greece, but the soil and sky and the, to it, unintelligible wreck of ancient magnificence, from which it fails apparently to draw even the ordinary lessons of civilisation: what period and region of the whole history of the world conveys a less important lesson than Greece during the Middle Ages of European History? It is scarcely less so with Italy, except for the fact that during a great part of those ages Italy was the centre and stage of Ecclesiastical History, in which, as I shall point out directly, and in which alone on any large or broad scale, the unity and continuity are to be found.

The vital interest of Medieval and Modern History lies in England, France and Germany, as certainly as that of the ancient lies in the East, in Greece and Italy; no small part of that of the future lies in the further Western world. The actors in the medieval and modern drama are the new nations, nations that were unheard of before the decline of the Roman empire began, and which inherited from the civilisation of that empire only the ecclesiastical