The Household Of Sir Thomas More

It is not always from the closest and most accurate historian that we receive the truest picture of an age or of a character. The artist gives a more real picture than the photographer; and it needs imagination and sympathy, as well as labour and research, to make a hero of old time live again to-day. The minutest investigation will hardly better the vivid reality of Scott's James I. or Charles II., or portray more truly than Mr. Shorthouse has done the fragile yet fascinating personality of Charles I. Yet to say this is not to undervalue history or to contemn the labour of true students. Rather, without their aid we cannot rightly see the past at all: it comes to us only with the distortions of our own prejudice and our narrow modern outlook. We need both the work of the scholar and the imagination of the artist. Without the first we could not behold the past, without the second we could not understand it.