etty. But much as I should like to discuss the decay of English
Society and the English nation, I feel that such lofty themes are beyond
my reach. I am concerned only with the so-called decay of humbler
things, the abstract manifestations of the human intellect, the Arts and
Sciences. And lest, weary at the end of my discourse, you forget the
argument or miss it, let me state at once what I wish to suggest, nay,
what I wish to assert, _there is no such thing as decay_. Decay is an
intellectual Mrs. Harris, a highly useful entity wherewith the
journalistic Gamps try to frighten Betsy Prig. Of course an obvious
objection to my assertion is the truism that everything has a life; and
that towards the end of that natural life we are correct in speaking of
approaching decay. With physical phenomena, however, I am not dealing,
though I may say, by the way, that there are many examples of human
intellect maturing in middle life or extreme old age. William Blake's
masterpiece, the illustrations to the Book of Job, were executed when he
was sixty-eight, a few years before his death. The late Lord Kelvin is
an example of an unimpaired intellect. Still, it must be admitted that
while nations may be destroyed by conquest, or by conquering too much and
becoming absorbed by the conquered, and that ancient buildings may be
pulled down or restored, so, too, conventions in literature and schools
of art have been brought to an end by war, plague, or death--ostensibly
brought to an end. But it is an error to suppose that art or literature,
because their development was artificially arrested, were in a state of
decay.

The favourite object-lesson of our childhood was the Roman Empire.
'Here's richness,' as Mr. Squeers said, here was decline, and Gibbon
wrote his prose epic from that point of view. I hardly dare to differ
with the greatest of English historians, but if we approach his work in
the scientific spirit with which we should always regard history, we
shall find that Gibbon draws false deductions from the undisputed facts,
the unchallenged assertions of his history. Commencing with the Roman
Empire almost in its cradle, he sees in every twist of the infant limbs
prognostications of premature decline in a dispensation which by his own
computation lasted over fourteen hundred years. It is safe enough to
prophesy about the past. Everything I admit has a life, but I do not
consider old age decay any more than I think exuber