and in society. I trust
this is a libel, but, for the sake of the argument, suppose they do. Was
ever produced so insipid a result?

The characteristics which are prominent, when we think of our recent
fiction, are a wholly unidealized view of human society, which has got
the name of realism; a delight in representing the worst phases of social
life; an extreme analysis of persons and motives; the sacrifice of action
to psychological study; the substitution of studies of character for
anything like a story; a notion that it is not artistic, and that it is
untrue to nature, to bring any novel to a definite consummation, and
especially to end it happily; and a despondent tone about society,
politics, and the whole drift of modern life. Judged by our fiction, we
are in an irredeemably bad way.

The vulgar realism in pictorial art, which holds ugliness and beauty in
equal esteem; or against aestheticism gone to seed in languid
affectations; or against the enthusiasm of a social life which wreaks its
religion on the color of a vestment, or sighs out its divine soul over an
ancient pewter mug.

MR. FROUDE'S PROGRESS

For, as skepticism is in one sense the handmaid of truth, discontent is
the mother of progress. The man is comparatively of little use in the
world who is contented.

Education of the modern sort unsettles the peasant, renders him unfit for
labor, and gives us a half-educated idler in place of a conscientious
workman.

Education must go forward; the man must not be half but wholly educated.
It is only half-knowledge like half-training in a trade that is
dangerous.

Mr. Froude runs lightly over a list of subjects upon which the believer
in progress relies for his belief, and then says of them that the world
calls this progress--he calls it only change.

There are some select souls who sit apart in calm endurance, waiting to
be translated out of a world they are almost tired of patronizing, to
whom the whole thing seems, doubtless, like a cheap performance. They
sit on the fence of criticism, and cannot for the life of them see what
the vulgar crowd make such a toil and sweat about.

ENGLAND

Both parties, however, like parties elsewhere, propose and oppose
measures and movements, and accept or reject policies, simply to get
office or keep office.

In the judgment of many good observers, a dissolution of the empire, so
far as the Western colonies are concerned, is inevitable, unless