h comes of vital truth profoundly seen
and clearly shown. For this reason when all Europe besides turned her
face to the light, some decades ago, in the pages of the great prose
poets who made the age illustrious, England preferred the smoky links
and dancing camp-fires which had pleased her immature fancy, and kept
herself well in the twilight of the old ideal of imagination as the
mother of unrealities. There could be no doubt, the philosopher thought,
that the recrudescence which her best wits recognized as the effects of
this perversity, was the origin of the preposterous fiction which we now
feed to the new reading public, and which we think must somehow be right
because it was hers and is ours, and has the sanction of race and
tradition.

It was not, he continued, a thing to shed the tear of unavailing regret
for, though it was not a transitory phase, or a state of transition, for
the condition that now existed had always existed. The new reading
public was larger than ever before not merely because there was a fresh
demand for reading, but because more people were lettered and moneyed
and leisured, and did not know what otherwise to do with themselves. It
was quite simple, and the fact was less to be regretted in itself than
for an indirect result which might be feared from it. He paused at this,
in order to be asked what this result was, and being promptly asked he
went on.

It was, he said, the degradation of authorship as a calling, in the
popular regard. He owned that in the past authorship had enjoyed too
much honor in the reverence and affection of the world: not always,
indeed, but at certain times. As long as authors were the clients and
dependents of the great, they could not have been the objects of a
general interest or honor. They had then passed the stage when the
simple poet or story-teller was wont to

--sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the deaths of kings,

to wondering and admiring circles of simple listeners, and they had not
yet come to that hour of authorship when it reverted to the peasantry,
now turned people, and threw itself upon the people's generous
acceptance and recognition for bread and fame. But when that hour came,
it brought with it the honor of a reverent and persistent curiosity
concerning literature and the literary life, which the philosopher said
he was afraid could not survive the actual superabundance of authors and
the transformat