ipes to kill them with cavalry. It is
not possible to say whether these external displays are relics of
barbarism or are enduring necessities of human nature.

The fickleness of men in costume in a manner burlesques their shifty and
uncertain taste in literature. A book or a certain fashion in letters
will have a run like a garment, and, like that, will pass away before it
waxes old. It seems incredible, as we look back over the literary history
of the past three centuries only, what prevailing styles and moods of
expression, affectations, and prettinesses, each in turn, have pleased
reasonably cultivated people. What tedious and vapid things they read and
liked to read! Think of the French, who had once had a Villon,
intoxicating themselves with somnolent draughts of Richardson. But, then,
the French could match the paste euphuisms of Lyly with the novels of
Scudery. Every modern literature has been subject to these epidemics and
diseases. It is needless to dwell upon them in detail. Since the great
diffusion of printing, these literary crazes have been more frequent and
of shorter duration. We need go back no further than a generation to find
abundant examples of eccentricities of style and expression, of crazes
over some author or some book, as unaccountable on principles of art as
many of the fashions in social life.--The more violent the attack, the
sooner it is over. Readers of middle age can recall the furor over
Tupper, the extravagant expectations as to the brilliant essayist
Gilfillan, the soon-extinguished hopes of the poet Alexander Smith. For
the moment the world waited in the belief of the rising of new stars, and
as suddenly realized that it had been deceived. Sometimes we like
ruggedness, and again we like things made easy. Within a few years a
distinguished Scotch clergyman made a fortune by diluting a paragraph
written by Saint Paul. It is in our memory how at one time all the boys
tried to write like Macaulay, and then like Carlyle, and then like
Ruskin, and we have lived to see the day when all the girls would like to
write like Heine.

In less than twenty years we have seen wonderful changes in public taste
and in the efforts of writers to meet it or to create it. We saw the
everlastingly revived conflict between realism and romanticism. We saw
the realist run into the naturalist, the naturalist into the animalist,
the psychologist into the sexualist, and the sudden reaction to romance,
in the form