the spirit of nationality which will help to supply needful idealism.
It will allow a man of letters to frequent the past without becoming
archaic and to travel abroad without becoming exotic, because it will
supply him always with a good reason for remaining a citizen of his own
country.

(1904.)

THE SUPREME LEADERS

In the fading annals of French Romanticism it is recorded that at the
first performance of an early play of the elder Dumas at the Odeon, a
band of enthusiasts, as misguided as they were youthful, were so
completely carried away that they formed a ring and danced in derision
around a bust of Racine which adorned that theater, declaring
boisterously that the elder dramatist was disgraced and disestablished:
_'Enfonce Racine!'_

This puerile exploit took place not fourscore years ago, and already has
this play of Dumas disappeared beneath the wave of oblivion, its very
name being recalled only by special students of the history of the
French stage, while the Comedie-Francaise continues, year in and year
out, to act the best of Racine's tragedies, now nearly two centuries and
a half since they were first performed.

Again, in the records of the British theater of the eighteenth century,
we find mention of a countryman of John Home, who attended the first
performance of the reverend author's 'Douglas.' The play so worked upon
the feelings of this perfervid Scot that he was forced to cry out
triumphantly: "Whaur's your Wully Shakspere noo?"

And yet this Scottish masterpiece failed to establish itself finally on
the stage; and it has long since past out of men's memories, leaving
behind it only a quotation or two and a speech for boys to spout. So in
every age the disinterested observer can take note of the rise and fall
of some unlucky author or artist, painter or poet, widely and loudly
proclaimed as a genius, only to be soon forgotten, often in his own
generation. He may have soared aloft for a brief moment with starry
scintillations, like a rocket, only at last to come down like the stick,
empty and unnoticed.

The echoes of the old battle of the Ancients and Moderns have not died
away, even yet; and there is never a time when some ardent disciple is
not insisting that his immediate master must be admitted as one of the
immortals, and when some shrill youth is not ready to make room for the
new-comer by ousting any number of the consecrated chiefs of art. Now
and again, of course, th