nd yet how total is the contrast, at least at first sight! In
passing from Bacon to Addison, from Shakespeare to Pope, we seem to
pass into a new world.

In the first of these essays I spoke of the mode in which the literary
change happens, and I recur to it because, literature being narrower
and more definite than life, a change in the less serves as a model and
illustration of the change in the greater. Some writer, as was
explained, not necessarily a very excellent writer or a remembered one,
hit on something which suited the public taste: he went on writing, and
others imitated him, and they so accustomed their readers to that style
that they would bear nothing else. Those readers who did not like it
were driven to the works of other ages and other countries,--had to
despise the 'trash of the day,' as they would call it. The age of Anne
patronised Steele, the beginner of the essay, and Addison its
perfecter, and it neglected writings in a wholly discordant key. I have
heard that the founder of the 'Times' was asked how all the articles in
the 'Times' came to seem to be written by one man, and that he
replied--'Oh, there is always some one best contributor, and all the
rest copy.' And this is doubtless the true account of the manner in
which a certain trade mark, a curious and indefinable unity, settles on
every newspaper. Perhaps it would be possible to name the men who a few
years since created the 'Saturday Review' style, now imitated by
another and a younger race. But when the style of a periodical is once
formed, the continuance of it is preserved by a much more despotic
impulse than the tendency to imitation,--by the self-interest of the
editor, who acts as trustee, if I may say so, for the subscribers. The
regular buyers of a periodical want to read what they have been used to
read--the same sort of thought, the same sort of words. The editor sees
that they get that sort. He selects the suitable, the conforming
articles, and he rejects the non-conforming. What the editor does in
the case of a periodical, the readers do in the case of literature in
general. They patronise one thing and reject the rest.

Of course there was always some reason (if we only could find it) which
gave the prominence in each age to some particular winning literature.
There always is some reason why the fashion of female dress is what it
is. But just as in the case of dress we know that now-a-days the
determining cause is very much of