ate upon. But we are fallen into strange times; these things
will require to be speculated upon; to be rendered practicable, to be
in some way put in practice. These and many others. On all hands of
us, there is the announcement, audible enough, that the old Empire of
Routine has ended; that to say a thing has long been, is no reason for
its continuing to be. The things which have been are fallen into
decay, are fallen into incompetence; large masses of mankind, in every
society of our Europe, are no longer capable of living at all by the
things which have been. When millions of men can no longer by their
utmost exertion gain food for themselves, and 'the third man for
thirty-six weeks each year is short of third-rate potatoes,' the
things which have been must decidedly prepare to alter themselves!--I
will now quit this of the organisation of Men of Letters.

* * * * *

Alas, the evil that pressed heaviest on those Literary Heroes of ours
was not the want of organisation for Men of Letters, but a far deeper
one; out of which, indeed, this and so many other evils for the
Literary Man, and for all men, had, as from their fountain, taken
rise. That our Hero as Man of Letters had to travel without highway,
companionless, through an inorganic chaos,--and to leave his own life
and faculty lying there, as a partial contribution towards _pushing_
some highway through it: this, had not his faculty itself been so
perverted and paralysed, he might have put up with, might have
considered to be but the common lot of Heroes. His fatal misery was
the _spiritual paralysis_, so we may name it, of the Age in which his
life lay; whereby his life too, do what he might, was half-paralysed!
The Eighteenth was a _Sceptical_ Century; in which little word there
is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries. Scepticism means not
intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of _in_fidelity,
insincerity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, in few centuries that one
could specify since the world began, was a life of Heroism more
difficult for a man. That was not an age of Faith,--an age of Heroes!
The very possibility of Heroism had been, as it were, formally
abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever; Triviality,
Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. The 'age of miracles' had
been, or perhaps had not been; but it was not any longer. An effete
world; wherein Wonder, Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell