…is the thing by which Wordsworth lives and seems to us important in the modern world. One of Wordsworth's contemporaries was Jane Austen. And here again is an extraordinary phenomenon. Pride and Prejudice was written, let me think, in 1796. And the other…

…enmeshed in the world of short-range history so that I think it would be very difficult now for a Montaigne or a Jane Austen to live quite so completely apart from the historical movement as was possible in the past largely because wars and revolutions…