Elethian quality, if I may say so--is
its presence in that marvellous miniature whose ingenious author you
would never suspect could have found room for such portentous
observations in the small duodecimo to which he confined himself:--

Unaffected language is the inseparable accompaniment of natural
refinement; but that affectation which would make up for paucity of
thought by overstrained expression is a mark of vulgarity from which
no accident of social position can redeem those who are guilty of it.

_To_ MORE ADEY, ESQ.

THERE IS NO DECAY.

_A Lecture delivered in the Old Bluecoat School, Liverpool, on February
12th, 1908_.

'In every age there is some question raised as to its wants and
powers, its strength and weakness, its great or small worth and work;
and in every age that question is waste of time and speech. To a
small soul the age which has borne it can appear only as an age of
small souls; the pigmy brain and emasculate spirit can perceive in its
own time nothing but dwarfishness and emasculation. Each century has
seemed to some of its children an epoch of decadence and decline in
national life and spiritual, in moral or material glory; each alike
has heard the cry of degeneracy raised against it, the wave of emulous
impotence set up against the weakness of the age.'--SWINBURNE.

Before the invention of printing, or let me say before the cheapening of
printing, the lecturer was in a more fortunate position than he is to-
day; because, if a learned man, he was able to give his audience certain
pieces of information which he could be fairly sure _some_ of his
listeners had never heard before. The arrival in town or city of
Abelard, Paracelsus, or Erasmus, to take the first instances occurring to
me, must have been a great event, the importance of which we can scarcely
appreciate at the present day. It must have excited our forefathers, at
least as much as the arrival of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in any large
city, excites I imagine, all of us to-day. But multiplication of books
has really rendered lecturers, as instructors, mere intellectual
Othellos; their occupation is gone; the erudition of the ages is now
within reach of all; though educational books were fairly expensive
within living memory. You owe, therefore, a debt of gratitude to the
_Times_ and the _Daily Mail_ for bringing Encyclopaedias of all kinds
into the range of the shallowest p