guage was to err, as the writer of a
scientific treatise would err who endeavoured to add charm and grace to
the sober record of his investigations. Dull sociological analysts
reigned in the once laughing domain of Cervantes, of Fielding and
Thackeray, of Dumas and Dickens, of Hugo and Gautier and George Sand.

Were they born too late? Were they anachronisms from the forgotten age
of romanticism, or were they just born in time to assist at the birth of
another romantic, idealistic age? Would dreams and love and beautiful
writing ever come into fashion again? Would the poet be again a creature
of passion, and the novelist once more make you laugh and cry; and would
there be essayists any more, whose pages you would mark and whose
phrases you would roll over and over again on your tongue, with delight
at some mysterious magic in the words?

History may be held to have answered these questions since then, much in
favour of those young men, or at all events is engaged in answering
them; but, meanwhile, what a miraculous refreshment in a dry and thirsty
land was the new book Henry Mesurier had just discovered, and had
eagerly brought to share with Ned in their tavern corner one summer
evening in 1885.

Ned was late; but when Henry had sipped a little at his port, and turned
to the new-born exquisite pages, he hardly noticed how the minutes were
going by as he read. Presently he had come to the end of the first
volume, the only one he had with him, and he raised his eyes from the
closing page with that exquisite exaltation, that beatific satisfaction
of mind and spirit,--even almost one might say of body,--which for the
lover of literature nothing in the world like a fine passage can bring.

He turned again to the closing sentences: "_Yes; what was wanting was
the heart that would make it impossible to witness all this; and the
future would be with the forces that would beget a heart like that. His
favourite philosophy had said, Trust the eye. Strive to be right always,
regarding the concrete experience. Never falsify your impressions. And
its sanction had been at least effective here, in saying: It is what I
may not see! Surely, evil was a real thing; and the wise man wanting in
the sense of it, where not to have been, by instinctive election, on the
right side was to have failed in life_."

The passage referred to the Roman gladiatorial shows, and to the
philosophic detachment by which Marcus Aurelius was able to see an