sis of the Time Traveller, are the descendants
of the leisured classes; the Morlocks of the workers. "The Eloi, like
the Carlovingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They
still possessed the earth on sufferance; since the Morlocks,
subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the
day-lit surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made their garments, I
inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs perhaps through
the survival of an old habit of service." All this is in the year
802,701 A.D.

The prophecy is less convincing than the wonderful sight of the
declining earth some million years later, sinking slowly into the
dying fires of the worn-out sun. Man and the vertebrates have
disappeared, and the highest wonder of animal life is represented by
giant crustaceans, which in turn give way to a lower form. We have a
vision of an involution that shall succeed the highest curve of
development; of life ending where it began in the depths of the sea,
as the initial energy of the solar system is dissipated and the
material of it returns to rest at the temperature of the absolute
zero. And the picture is made more horrible to the imaginative by the
wonder whether the summit of the evolutionary curve has not already
been reached--or it may be passed in the days of the Greek
philosophers.

_The Time Machine_, despite certain obvious faults of imagination and
style, is a brilliant fantasy; and it affords a valuable picture of
the young Wells looking at the world, with his normal eyes, and
finding it, more particularly, incomplete. At the age of twenty-seven
or so, he has freed himself very completely from the bonds of
conventional thought, and is prepared to examine, and to present life
from the detached standpoint of one who views it all from a
respectable distance; but who is able, nevertheless--an essential
qualification--to enter life with all the passion and generosity of
his own humanity.

And in _The Wonderful Visit_--published in the same year as _The Time
Machine_--he comes closer to earth. That ardent ornithologist, the
Rev. K. Hilyer, Vicar of Siddermouth, who brought down an angel with a
shot-gun, is tenderly imagined; a man of gentle mind, for all the
limitations of his training. The mortalised angel, on the other hand,
is rather a tentative and simple creature. He may represent, perhaps,
the rather blank mind of one who sees country society without having
had the inesti