in Kidd, Doctor Beattie Crozier and Mr Wordsworth Donisthorpe
glittering out into any so cheerful an exploit as this before us. Like
Mr Gilbert's elderly naval man, they "never larks nor plays", and if
indeed they did so far triumph over the turgid intricacies of our speech
and the conscientious gravity of our style of thought, there would still
be the English public to consider, a public easily offended by any lack
of straightforwardness in its humorists, preferring to be amused by
known and recognised specialists in that line, in relation to themes of
recognised humorous tendency, and requiring in its professors as the
concomitant of a certain dignified inaccessibility of thought and
language, an honourable abstinence from the treacheries, as it would
consider them, of irony and satire. Imagine a Story of the Future from
Mr Herbert Spencer! America and the north of England would have swept
him out of all respect.... But M. Tarde being not only a Member of the
Institute and Professor at the College of France, but a Frenchman, was
free to give these fancies that entertained him, public, literary, and
witty expression, without self-destruction, and produce what has, in its
English dress, a curiously unfamiliar effect. Yet the English reader who
can overcome his natural disinclination to this union of intelligence
and jesting will find a vast amount of suggestion in M. Tarde's
fantastic abundance, and bringing his habitual gravity to bear may even
succeed in digesting off the humour altogether, and emerging with
edification of--it must be admitted--a rather miscellaneous sort.

It is perhaps remarkable that for so many people, so tremendous a theme
as the material future of mankind should only be approachable either
through a method of conscientiously technical, pseudo-scientific
discussion that is in effect scarcely an approach at all or else in this
mood of levity. I know of no book in this direction that can claim to be
a permanent success which combines a tolerable intelligibility with a
simple good faith in the reader. One may speculate how this comes about?
The subject it would seem is so grave and great as to be incompatibly
out of proportion to the affairs and conditions of the individual life
about which our workaday thinking goes on. We are interested indeed, but
at the same time we feel it is outside us and beyond us. To turn one's
attention to it is at once to get an effect of presumption, strain, and
extravaga