rmur of living,
Stir of existence,
Soul of the world!'

seem to be fading from literature. Pure literary enthusiasm sheds but
few rays. To be lively is to be flippant, and epigram is dubbed paradox.

That many people appear to like a drab-coloured world hung round with
dusky shreds of philosophy is sufficiently obvious. These persons find
any relaxation they may require from a too severe course of theories,
religious, political, social, or now, alas! historical, in the novels of
Mr. W. D. Howells, an American gentleman who has not been allowed to
forget that he once asserted of fiction what Professor Seeley would be
glad to be able to assert of history, that the drowsy spell of narrative
has been broken. We are to look for no more Sir Walters, no more
Thackerays, no more Dickens. The stories have all been told. Plots are
exploded. Incident is over. In moods of dejection these dark sayings
seemed only too true. Shakspeare's saddest of sad lines rose to one's
lips:

'My grief lies onward and my joy behind.'

Behind us are _Ivanhoe_ and _Guy Mannering_, _Pendennis_ and _The
Virginians_, Pecksniff and Micawber. In front of us stretch a
never-ending series, a dreary vista of _Foregone Conclusions_,
_Counterfeit Presentments_, and _Undiscovered Countries_. But the
darkest watch of the night is the one before the dawn, and relief is
often nearest us when we least expect it. All this gloomy nonsense was
suddenly dispelled, and the fact that really and truly, and behind this
philosophical arras, we were all inwardly ravening for stories was most
satisfactorily established by the incontinent manner in which we flung
ourselves into the arms of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, to whom we could
almost have raised a statue in the market-place for having written
_Treasure Island_.

But to return to history. The interests of our poor human life, which
seems to become duller every day, require that the fields of history
should be kept for ever unenclosed, and be a free breathing-place for a
pallid population well-nigh stifled with the fumes of philosophy.

Were we, imaginatively, to propel ourselves forward to the middle of the
next century, and to fancy a well-equipped historian armed with the
digested learning of Gibbon, endowed with the eye of Carlyle, and say one-
fifteenth of his humour (even then a dangerous allotment in a dull
world), the moral gravity of Dr. Arnold, the critical sympathy of Sainte-
Beuve