ain that there is no necessity for apologizing
for a man who helped in a small way to stop such mutilation.

We have heard a discussion to-night on the disappearance of literature.
That's no new thing. That's what certain kinds of literature have been
doing for several years. The fact is, my friends, that the fashion in
literature changes, and the literary tailors have to change their cuts
or go out of business. Professor Winchester here, if I remember fairly
correctly what he said, remarked that few, if any, of the novels
produced to-day would live as long as the novels of Walter Scott. That
may be his notion. Maybe he is right; but so far as I am concerned, I
don't care if they don't.

Professor Winchester also said something about there being no modern
epics like Paradise Lost. I guess he's right. He talked as if he was
pretty familiar with that piece of literary work, and nobody would
suppose that he never had read it. I don't believe any of you have ever
read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you
just want to take on trust. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester
says, and it meets his definition of a classic--something that everybody
wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Professor Trent also had a good deal to say about the disappearance of
literature. He said that Scott would outlive all his critics. I guess
that's true. The fact of the business is, you've got to be one of two
ages to appreciate Scott. When you're eighteen you can read Ivanhoe, and
you want to wait until you are ninety to read some of the rest. It takes
a pretty well-regulated, abstemious critic to live ninety years.

But as much as these two gentlemen have talked about the disappearance
of literature, they didn't say anything about my books. Maybe they think
they've disappeared. If they do, that just shows their ignorance on the
general subject of literature. I am not as young as I was several years
ago, and maybe I'm not so fashionable, but I'd be willing to take
my chances with Mr. Scott to-morrow morning in selling a piece of
literature to the Century Publishing Company. And I haven't got much of
a pull here, either. I often think that the highest compliment ever
paid to my poor efforts was paid by Darwin through President Eliot, of
Harvard College. At least, Eliot said it was a compliment, and I always
take the opinion of great men like college presidents on all such
subjects as that.

I went out t