which is full of history, I entered a hall and saw an old
puppet-play exactly as our fathers saw it five hundred years ago.
It was admirably translated from the old German, and was the original
tale of Faust. The dolls were at once comic and convincing;
but if you cannot at once laugh at a thing and believe in it,
you have no business in the Middle Ages. Or in the world,
for that matter.

The puppet-play in question belongs, I believe, to the fifteenth century;
and indeed the whole legend of Dr. Faustus has the colour of
that grotesque but somewhat gloomy time. It is very unfortunate
that we so often know a thing that is past only by its tail end.
We remember yesterday only by its sunsets. There are many instances.
One is Napoleon. We always think of him as a fat old despot, ruling
Europe with a ruthless military machine. But that, as Lord Rosebery
would say, was only "The Last Phase"; or at least the last but one.
During the strongest and most startling part of his career,
the time that made him immortal, Napoleon was a sort of boy,
and not a bad sort of boy either, bullet-headed and ambitious,
but honestly in love with a woman, and honestly enthusiastic for a cause,
the cause of French justice and equality.

Another instance is the Middle Ages, which we also remember
only by the odour of their ultimate decay. We think of the life
of the Middle Ages as a dance of death, full of devils and
deadly sins, lepers and burning heretics. But this was not
the life of the Middle Ages, but the death of the Middle Ages.
It is the spirit of Louis XI and Richard III, not of Louis IX
and Edward I.