Many of these may be exaggerated fancies, one was certainly an avowed fiction, others are quite different from it and more difficult to dissipate into the daylight.

But one curious fact remains about them if they were all lies, or even if they were all deliberate works of art.

Not one of them referred to those close, crowded, and stirring three centuries which are nearest to us, and which alone are covered in this sketch, the centuries during which the Teutonic influence had expanded itself over our islands.

Ghosts were there perhaps, but they were the ghosts of forgotten ancestors.

Nobody saw Cromwell or even Wellington; nobody so much as thought about Cecil Rhodes.