— absolutely requires a costume: he needs history as a storeroom of costumes. To be sure, he notices that none of the costumes fit him properly — he changes and changes. Let us look at the nineteenth century with respect to these hasty preferences and changes in its masquerades of style, and also with respect to its moments of desperation on account of “nothing suiting” us.

It is in vain to get ourselves up as romantic, or classical, or Christian, or Florentine, or barocco, or “national,” in moribus et artibus: it does not “clothe us”! But the “spirit,” especially the “historical spirit,” profits even by this desperation: once and again a new sample of the past or of the foreign is tested, put on, taken off, packed up, and above all studied — we