ny that can
ever have prevailed at other periods--of regarding the main stuff and
substance of literature. Much reading of novels, which are to the
ordinary reader his books, and his only books, has induced him to take
their standards as the standards of both nature and life. And this is
all the more dangerous because in all probability the writers of these
very novels have themselves acquired their knowledge, formed their
standards, in a manner little if at all more first-hand. We have nature,
not as Jones or Brown saw it for himself, but as he saw it through the
spectacles of Mr. Ruskin or of Jefferies; art, not as he saw it himself,
but as he saw it through those of Mr. Ruskin again or of Mr. Pater;
literary criticism as he learnt it from Mr. Arnold or from
Sainte-Beuve; criticism of life as he took it from Thackeray or from
Mr. Meredith.

Something like this has occurred at least three times before in the
history of European literature. It happened in late Graeco-Roman times,
and all the world knows what the cure was then, and how the
much-discussed barbarian cleared the mind of Europe of its literary cant
by very nearly clearing out all the literature as well. It happened on a
much smaller scale, and with a less tremendous purgation, at the close
of the Middle Ages, when the world suddenly, as it were, shut up one
library and opened another; and at the end of the seventeenth and
beginning of the eighteenth century, when it shut both of these or the
greater part of them, and took to a small bookshelf of "classics," a
slender stock of carefully observed formulae and--common sense.

What it will take to now, nobody can say; but that it will in one
fashion or another change most of its recent wear, shut most of its
recent books, and perhaps give itself something of a holiday from
literature, except in scholastic shapes, may be not quite impossible.
Another _Lyrical Ballads_ may be coming for this decade, as it came a
hundred years ago: all we can say is that it apparently has not come
yet. But whether it does come or does not, the moment is certainly no
bad one, even if chronology did not make it inviting, for setting in
order the actual, the certain, the past and registered production of the
century since the dawn of the great change which ended its vigil. The
historian, as he closes his record, is only too conscious of the
objections to omission that may probably be brought against him, and of
those of too liberal