and ended with
the passing of the Liang dynasty in the five-fifties: a matter
of thirteen decades again; which, I take it, is further reason
for considering our four-twenties epochal.

I fancy we shall grow used to finding the twenties in each
century momentous, and marked by great political and spiritual
re-shapings of the world. We shall find this in our historical
studies; in the next few years we may find it in current events
too; and what we shall see may remind us that in these decades
the sun generally rises in some new part of the world,--the sun
of culture and power. Naturally enough:--in the last quarter of
each century you have the influx of spiritual forces; which
influx, it is to be supposed, can hardly fail to produce changes
inwardly,--a new temperature, new conditions in the world of
mind. So there must be readjustments; there is a disharmony
between outer and inner things, between the world of causes and
the world of effects; and one commonly finds the first two
decades of the new century filled with the noise and confusion of
readjustment. New wine has been poured into the old skin-bottles
of the world; and ferments, explodes, rends them. Then, in
the twenties or so, things calm down, and it is seen that
readjustments have been made. By 'readjustments,' one does not
mean the treaties of statesmen and the like; brain-mind affairs
for the most part, that amount to nothing. One means a new
direction taken by the tide of incarnating souls. As if the
readjusting cataclysms had blocked their old channels of these,
and opened new ones...

A new _arpeggio_ chord, but rather a faint and broken one, sounds
in the five-twenties, or begins then. At Constantinople the
thirteen pralayic and recuperative decades since the death of
Theodosius and the split with the West have ended. Now an
emperor dies; and it becomes a question which of several likely
candidates can lay out his money to best advantage and secure the
succession. There is an official of some sort at court there,
one Justin, a Balkan peasant by birth; you will do well to bribe
him heavily, for he, probably, can manage the affair for you,--
One of the candidates does so: hands him a large sum, on the
assurance from Justin that he shall be the man. But the old
fellow has peasant shrewdness, shall we say; and the money is
_used_ most thriftily; but not as its donor intended. Justin
duly ascends the throne.

Nothing very promising in t