Introduction IN ATIONALISM came late into the The modern imagination, consciously archaistic in temper, and stimulated by a profound and deliberately cultivated historic sense, finds delight in the visual reconstruction of the past through a succession of decorative scenes, linked together in no more coherent a dramatic unity than can be furnished by the pride of locality and the continuance of civic tradition. Obviously the historic pageant, as it is represented at Sherborne, at Warwick, at Oxford, owes much to the spectacular methods of the middle ages. The annalistic manner, the naive stringing of episode upon episode at the will of the chronicle, is the same; and at the bottom one may trace a revival of the same instinct of popular merry-making, content to depend for revelry upon its own untutored efforts, rather than upon the sophisticated and exotic art of the professional entertainer. Even so, with just such a rudimentary technique and just such a buoyancy and feeling of play, must the citizens 5 |