rounded periods, which in moments of stress soar to the dithyrambic.

How full, for instance, of thrilling portent is the cry that "the finger of Fate is uncurled, and the hand of Destiny steps in to pace the marble halls!" intended as a parody, but whose awful pomp and circumstance of phrase might easily be matched from any issue of "The Fireside Companion," from any volume of Pierce Egan, or Laura Jean Libby; and Marie Corelli could easily claim it as one of her most impassioned flights.

The amount of this stuff poured forth is wellnigh incredible; the appetite for it being apparently never satiated. Its purveyors are rarely known, even by name, to the upper literary world, though their compositions form the impressions of life of the larger half of their contemporaries, and they wield an influence and incur a responsibility that might stagger the most courageous. Not that these writers do stagger under their responsibility for the most part they seem to pour out their creations with as little concern as the sweat-shops turn out coats and shirts, indifferent as to what they fashion, or who wears it, and interested only in the weekly wage. One hears little or nothing of these authors. They seem to have none of the artistic vice of selfconsciousness; to itch with no desire for fame; to

possess no Bohemia. One catches no rumour of their message to humanity, or of their motor-cars; and men whose names adorn half a hundred volumes take themselves less seriously than poetlings responsible for a few tags of verse in the magazines. Neither does the world at large take seriously either these authors or their productions. Yet it cannot be that this flood of reading-matter does not leave behind it some deposit in the minds over which it passes. In its favour it is to be noted that virtue is always triumphant; but can it be that these fantastic misrepresentations of life do no harm? For the last half century the democratization of printed matter has drenched the masses in a modernized, vulgarized fairy-lore, and it would be of value if scientific methods of investigation were applied to the study of what its influence has been. For it is a new influence. The fiction of the past was sparse and ancient, and but few, compared with the number of readers of our day, came under its spell. This question tempts speculation.

On the whole, this meat of the masses leads slowly, almost imperceptibly, toward higher things, through forming a taste for reading. The endless multiplication of the free library insensibly insinuates a better sort of literature upon the notice of the masses, for the library does not, as a rule,

admit the shilling-shocker: it bars Pierce Egan and Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, and their later confrères. In default of its favourite sweets, the proletariat reluctantly nibbles at the wholesome bread of literature, and in some cases develops a taste for it.

VIII

THE BOOKS OF THE BOURGEOISIE

PON no development of the human spirit can

UPON

one strike one's hand and say, "At this point it had its beginning-here it had its end." For whether it rise or fall, the curves droop by such imperceptible gradations to the nadir, mount so slowly to the zenith, that not until the extreme point is passed can one look back and perceive when and where the change in direction was begun.

The tide of the sea, while it rises, falls back from the shore with each wave, though each following ripple climbs an almost immeasurable distance higher than its predecessor. The rising tide of general intelligence is almost equally slow, equally imperceptible, to the eye.

Who can say when it is that Caliban, nosing in the offal for his food, first looks up to regard his fellows with a gleam of interest, to speculate as to their thoughts, to compare with his own their hopes and their aspirations? How much later is it that he suspects the existence of a Setebos? When does he commence to ponder upon that Superman to whom

he credits like passions with himself, translated to a larger scale and thus begins to fashion his gods in his own image?

From that first obscure turn of the tide of the spirit begins the lap, lap, lap of the ripples; each passing upward a little more, each retreating in turn, but never falling back quite so far as the last; forever pushed forward by blind but irresistible impulse that, apparently defeated in every wave, never relaxes its onward surge.

While the spread of education, and the cheapening and multiplication of books, have seemed to produce a sudden and unprecedented rush forward, it is not to be supposed that the mental growth of man has changed the manner of its progress. There is still the falling back from each impulse in the inertia of spent effort. Still so slow is the coming of the flood, that only the gradual submergence of the rocks of error and ignorance show that per se

muove.

We have watched the fable and the fairy tale transformed into the shilling-shocker, and the wave seems to fall back as we see the old wholesome wild savouriness of the oral tale degenerate into the vulgar absurdities and pomposities of to-be-continued fiction. Yet a certain advance is obvious in the very sophistication of the new form, which brings it