Even the revolutionary spirit of the time looked both before and after, and took history as well as the human perfectibility imagined by philosophers into its purview.

In France the reformers appealed in the first instance for a States General--a mediaeval institution--as the corrective of their wrongs, and later when they could not, like their neighbours in Belgium, demand reform by way of the restoration of their historical rights, they were driven to go a step further back still, beyond history to what they conceived to be primitive society, and demand the rights of man.

This development of the historical sense, which had such a widespread influence on politics, got itself into literature in the creation of the historical novel.

Scott and Chateaubriand revived the old romance in which by a peculiar ingenuity of form, the adventures of a typical hero of fiction are cast in a historical setting and set about with portraits of real personages.

The historical sense affected, too, novels dealing with contemporary life.