Daily Inspiration Quote by Goldwin Smith

Smith’s jab lands with the neat cruelty of a historian who’s tired of romantic medieval cosplay. He isn’t merely correcting a factual error; he’s mocking a whole habit of mind: the urge to treat the Middle Ages as a moral theme park where faith was pure, commerce was honest, and corruption hadn’t been invented yet.

The first move is procedural, almost bureaucratic: don’t argue from vibes, he says, read the laws. “Commercial legislation” is doing heavy lifting here. Laws are society’s involuntary autobiography; you don’t draft rules against a behavior that doesn’t exist. By pointing to England’s medieval regulations, Smith implies that fraud was common enough to require repeated, specific, and enforceable attention. The subtext is that nostalgia is often just selective illiteracy.

Then comes the kicker: “if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a fancy to run away with him.” Smith frames the debate as less about evidence than about temperament. Reasonable people can be convinced; aestheticists and ideologues prefer their myths intact. It’s a sly rebuke to Victorian-era medievalism (the era’s Gothic revival, chivalric fantasies, and moral contrast-making against industrial capitalism). Smith, writing in a period anxious about modern commerce, refuses the comforting storyline that fraud is a modern disease born with factories and finance.

His intent is pointedly modern: stop laundering present-day discomfort through an imagined past. If you want to criticize capitalism, fine, but don’t recruit the Middle Ages as your alibi. The record won’t cooperate, unless you let your “fancy” do the reading for you.