History, as it stands all bound up in gilt volumes, is but a shade more instructive than the wooden volumes of a backgammon-board.' Carlyle was a voice crying in the wilderness.

Today the new history, whose way he prepared, has come.

The present age differs from the centuries before it in its vivid realization of that much-neglected person the man in the street; or (as it was more often in the earliest ages) the man with the hoe.

Today the historian is interested in the social life of the past and not only in the wars and intrigues of princes.

To the modern writer, the fourteenth century, for instance, is not merely the century of the Hundred Years' War and of the Black Prince and Edward III; more significantly it is for him the era of the slow decay of villeinage in England, a fact more epoch-making, in the long run, than the struggle over our French provinces.