nd therefore
anxious to keep pace with every changing breath of popular favour: and I
notice a constant increase from year to year in the number of short
stories in magazines and newspapers dealing with the romance of the
inferior races. I notice, also, that such stories are increasingly
successful with the public. This shows that, whether the public knows it
or not itself, the question of race is interesting it more and more. It
is gradually growing to understand the magnitude of the change that has
come over civilisation by the inclusion of Asia, Africa, and Australasia
within its circle. Even the Queen is learning Hindustani.

There is a famous passage in Green's "Short History of the English
People" which describes in part that strange outburst of national
expansion under Elizabeth, when Raleigh, Drake, and Frobisher scoured
the distant seas, and when at home "England became a nest of singing
birds," with Shakespeare, Spenser, Fletcher, and Marlow. "The old sober
notions of thrift," says the picturesque historian, "melted before the
strange revolutions of fortune wrought by the New World. Gallants
gambled away a fortune at a sitting, and sailed off to make a fresh one
in the Indies." (Read rather to-day at Kimberley, Johannesburg,
Vancouver.) "Visions of galleons loaded to the brim with pearls and
diamonds and ingots of silver, dreams of El Dorados where all was of
gold, threw a haze of prodigality and profusion over the imagination of
the meanest seaman. The wonders, too, of the New World kindled a burst
of extravagant fancy in the Old. The strange medley of past and present
which distinguishes its masques and feastings only reflected the medley
of men's thoughts.... A 'wild man' from the Indies chanted the Queen's
praises at Kenilworth, and Echo answered him. Elizabeth turned from the
greetings of sibyls and giants to deliver the enchanted lady from her
tyrant, 'Sans Pitie.' Shepherdesses welcomed her with carols of the
spring, while Ceres and Bacchus poured their corn and grapes at her
feet." Oh, gilded youth of the Gaiety, _mutato nomine de te Fabula
narratur_. Yours, yours is this glory!

For our own age, too, is a second Elizabethan. It blossoms out daily
into such flowers of fancy as never bloomed before, save then, on
British soil. When men tell you nowadays we have "no great writers
left," believe not the silly parrot cry. Nay, rather, laugh it down for
them. We move in the midst of one of the mightiest ep