uilleton_ materials; yet the "Legataire" kept a foothold on the stage
for a hundred and twenty years. But the Temple of Fame is overcrowded.
Every day some worthy fellow is turned out to make room for a new-comer.
Our libraries are not large enough to hold the mob of authors who press
in. What with newspapers, magazines, and the last new novel, few persons
have time to read more than the titles on the backs of their books. They
are familiar with the great names, take their excellence on trust, and
allow them to stand neglected and dusty on their shelves. But with
another generation the great names will become mere shadows of a name;
and so on to oblivion. Father Time has a good taste in literature, it is
true. He mows down with his critical scythe the tares which spring up in
such daily abundance; but, unfortunately, he cannot stop there: after a
lapse of years, he sweeps away also the fruit of the good seed to make
room for the productions of his younger children.

"For he's their parent and he is their grave."

The doom is universal; it cannot be avoided. There must be an end to all
temporal things, and why not to books? The same endless night awaits a
Plato and a penny-a-liner. Our Eternities of Fame, like all else
appertaining to humanity, will some day pass away. Even Milton and
Shakspeare, our great staple international poets, who have been brought
out whenever the American ambassador to England dined in public, are
travelling the same downward path. How many of us, man or woman, on the
sunny side of thirty, have gone through the "Paradise Lost"? And
Shakspeare, in spite of new editions and of new commentators, is not
half as much read as fifty years since. Perhaps the time will come when
English speaking people will not know to whom they owe so many of the
proverbs, metaphors, and eloquent words which enrich their daily talk.

Will none escape this inexorable fate? Homer and Robinson Crusoe seem to
us to have the most tenacity of life.

FOOTNOTES:

[F] The proverbial French expression for the thief who rebuked his
reviling comrade at the crucifixion.

[G] Democrite, in an attack upon a heavy diner-out, says,--

"Il creuse son tombeau sans cesse avec ses dents,"--

and thus anticipates Sir Astley Cooper by many years. It is lucky that
these fellows, who took a mean advantage of seniority to get off our
good things before us, have perished, or they might give us trouble. At
least two Frenchmen could