off the plumage from their theses,
inquisitively demand, "_Cui bono_?" What is the use of all this? How can
we apply it to the every-day concerns of life? We ask you for bread and
you have given us a stone; and though that stone be a diamond, it is
valueless, except for its glitter. No philosopher can speculate
successfully or even satisfactorily to himself, when he is met at every
turn by some vulgar intruder into the domains of Aristotle and Kant, who
clips his wings just as he was prepared to soar into the heavens, by an
offer of copartnership to "speculate," it may be, in the price of pork.
Hence, no moral philosopher of our day has been enabled to erect any
theory which will stand the assaults of logic for a moment. Each school
rises for an instant to the surface, and sports out its little day in
toss and tribulation, until the next wave rolls along, with foam on its
crest and fury in its roar, and overwhelms it forever. As with its
predecessor, so with itself.

"The eternal surge
Of Time and Tide rolls on and bears afar
Their bubbles: as the old burst, new emerge,
Lashed from the foam of ages."

II. But I have stated that this is an age of _literary decline_. It is
true that more books are written and published, more newspapers and
periodicals printed and circulated, more extensive libraries collected
and incorporated, and more ink indiscriminately spilt, than at any
former period of the world's history. In looking about us we are
forcibly reminded of the sarcastic couplet of Pope, who complains--

"That those who cannot write, and those who can,
All scratch, all scrawl, and scribble to a man."

Had a modern gentleman all the eyes of Argus, all the hands of Briareus,
all the wealth of Croesus, and lived to the age of Methuselah, his
eyes would all fail, his fingers all tire, his money all give out, and
his years come to an end, long before he perused one tenth of the annual
product of the press of Christendom at the present day. It is no figure
of rhetoric to say that the press groans beneath the burden of its
labors. Could the types of Leipsic and London, Paris and New York, speak
out, the Litany would have to be amended, and a new article added, to
which they would solemnly respond: "Spare us, good Lord!"

A recent publication furnishes the following statistical facts relating
to the book trade in our own country: "Books have multiplied to such an
extent in the