of life and growth and harmonious exuberance of expansion, so loyal to rule of instinct and that natural order of art and thought whose service is perfect freedom; to lay out a chart of its progress and mark down the lines of its advance; this, high as the office would be and worthy the ambition, is not a possible task for criticism; though what manner of rank a man may hold and what manner of work he may have to do in that rank, it is the business of criticism to see and say.

In every age there is some question raised as to its wants and powers, its strength and weakness, its great or small worth and work; and in every age that question is waste of time and speech—of thought usually there is no waste, for the questioners have none to expend. There has never been an age that was not degenerate in the eyes of its own fools; the yelp of curtailed foxes in every generation is the same. To a small soul the age which has borne it can appear only as an age of small souls; the pigmy brain and emasculate spirit can perceive in its own time nothing but dwarfishness and emasculation. That the world has ever seen spirits of another sort, the poor heart of such creatures would fain deny and dares not; but to allow that the world does now is insufferable; at least they can "swagger themselves out of their own eyes" into the fond belief that they are but samples of their puny time, overtopped in spiritual stature by the spirits of times past alone. But not by blustering denial or blustering assertion of an age's greatness will the question be decided whether the age be great or not. Each century has seemed to some of its children an epoch of decadence and decline in national life and spiritual, in moral or