Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely w…

Some one said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its …