rs fools, so wise we grow:
Our wiser sons, perhaps, will think us so."

He need not have put in the "perhaps."

The nineteenth century had its fling at the artificiality of the
eighteenth century, and treated it with contempt as the age of
doctrinaires. And now that the twentieth century is coming to the age of
discretion, we hear a new term of reproach, Mid-Victorian. It expresses
the sum of all villainies in taste. For some fifty years in the
nineteenth century the English-speaking race, as it now appears, was
under the sway of Mrs. Grundy. It was living in a state of most
reprehensible respectability, and Art was tied to the apron-strings of
Morality. Everybody admired what ought not to be admired. We are only
now beginning to pass judgment on the manifold mediocrity of this era.

All this must, for the time, count against Dickens; for of all the
Victorians he was the midmost. He flourished in that most absurd period
of time--the time just before most of us were born. And how he did
flourish! Grave lord chancellors confessed to weeping over Little Nell.
A Mid-Victorian bishop relates that after administering consolation to
a man in his last illness he heard him saying, "At any rate, a new
'Pickwick Paper' will be out in ten days."

Everywhere there was a wave of hysterical appreciation. Describing his
reading in Glasgow, Dickens writes: "Such pouring of hundreds into a
place already full to the throat, such indescribable confusion, such
rending and tearing of dresses, and yet such a scene of good humor, I
never saw the slightest approach to.... Fifty frantic men got up in all
parts of the hall and addressed me all at once. Other frantic men made
speeches to the wall. The whole B family were borne on the top of a wave
and landed with their faces against the front of the platform. I read
with the platform crammed with people. I got them to lie down upon it,
and it was like some impossible tableau, or gigantic picnic,--one pretty
girl lying on her side all night, holding on to the legs of my table."

In New York eager seekers after fiction would "lie down on the pavement
the whole of the night before the tickets were sold, generally taking up
their position about ten." There would be free fights, and the police
would be called to quell the riot.

Such astonishing actions on the part of people who were unfortunate
enough to live in the middle of the nineteenth century put us on our
guard. It could not have been a