The modern sensibility is characterized by constant intimations of anachronism. So frequent are the jarring intrusions of the present into the past, and of the past— an often irrelevant and unintelligible past— into the present, that they are, one realizes, simply taken for granted most of the time— or treated as natural. It is part of being modern to exist amid wholly startling historical jumblings and scarcely to mind. On occasion one is pleased, as if the past were a refreshment. Sometimes one is convenienced: the fifteenth- century Welsh inn, where one has chosen to spend a quiet weekend in the country, turns out to possess a hot tub after all, and a compact disc player, and a disc library (itself an anachronistic term) blessed with a delectable menu of Bach, Bob Dylan and Purcell. The music of three eras, not simply three centuries, thus easily dazzles three colloquious aspects of one's modern soul, and this above a courtyard in which, long ago, sojourning players may have acted out scenes of Christ's passion, or a vision of Noah's flood- bound ark, or the bitter temptation in the original Garden, most likely from the Wakefield mystery cycles. In fact the latest modern players may themselves arrive, ready to reenact these and other misted biblical fables, possibly in modern dress and while speaking a modernized English. If they do so, however, they will almost certainly skip in by car, train, plane or even helicopter. They will scarcely come bumping along in a covered medieval wagon dragged by a team of sweaty, ancient horses.

Not everything is quite so pleasant. If modern anachronistic life has eliminated a bit of the sweat, it has not succeeded in eliminating a good deal of the old- fashioned horror. The shuffled deck of history produces more losers than winners. Plagues, epidemics, mass illiteracy, pogroms, religious wars, famines, acts of piracy and rampant poverty— all phenomena with an archaic Inquisitorial atmosphere, a sixteenth- or a thirteenth- century smell— wrangle and kick up a strange dust beside gleaming Lear jets and satellite dishes collecting radio waves in a malarial jungle.