have been educated, when self-education
has ceased. A terrible world to dream of, worse, far worse, in darkness and
hopelessness than Dante's lowest circle of hell. The spectre of famine, of
the plague, of war, etc., are mild and gracious symbols compared with that
menacing figure, Universal Education, with which we are threatened, which
has already eunuched the genius of the last five-and-twenty years of the
nineteenth century, and produced a limitless abortion in that of future
time. Education, I tremble before thy dreaded name. The cruelties of Nero,
of Caligula, what were they?--a few crunched limbs in the amphitheatre; but
thine, O Education, are the yearning of souls sick of life, of maddening
discontent, of all the fearsome and fathomless sufferings of the mind. When
Goethe said "More light," he said the wickedest and most infamous words
that human lips ever spoke. In old days, when a people became too highly
civilised the barbarians came down from the north and regenerated that
nation with darkness; but now there are no more barbarians, and sooner or
later I am convinced that we shall have to end the evil by summary
edicts--the obstruction no doubt will be severe, the equivalents of
Gladstone and Morley will stop at nothing to defeat the Bill; but it will
nevertheless be carried by patriotic Conservative and Unionist majorities,
and it will be written in the Statute Book that not more than one child in
a hundred shall be taught to read, and no more than one in ten thousand
shall learn the piano.

Such will be the end of Respectability, but the end is still far distant.
We are now in a period of decadence growing steadily more and more acute.
The old gods are falling about us, there is little left to raise our hearts
and minds to, and amid the wreck and ruin of things only a snobbery is left
to us, thank heaven, deeply graven in the English heart; the snob is now
the ark that floats triumphant over the democratic wave; the faith of the
old world reposes in his breast, and he shall proclaim it when the waters
have subsided.

In the meanwhile Respectability, having destroyed the Tavern, and created
the Club, continues to exercise a meretricious and enervating influence on
literature. All audacity of thought and expression has been stamped out,
and the conventionalities are rigorously respected. It has been said a
thousand times that an art is only a reflection of a certain age; quite so,
only certain ages are more