Toward the second product of the whirling presses, the books of to-day, our attitude may easily become too censorious or too complacent. It is the fashion to slander the productions of one’s own age and recall with a sigh the good old days when there were giants. But in those good old days it was fashionable, too, to underrate or ignore the living and praise the dead. When the Elizabethan age was waning but not vanished, Ben Jonson wrote: “Now things daily fall, wits grow downward, and eloquence grows backward.” And yet Milton, the greatest poet after Shakespeare, was even then a young man and had not done his noblest work. A century later Pope wrote: Be thou the first true merit to befriend; His praise is lost who stays till all commend. Short is the date, alas, of modern rhymes, And ’tis but just to let them live betimes. No longer now the golden age appears When Patriarch-wits surviv’d a thousand years: Now length of Fame (our second life) is lost, And bare three score is all even that can boast; Our sons their fathers’ failing language see, And such as Chaucer is shall Dryden be. But Chaucer is more alive now than he was in Pope’s day, and both Dryden and Pope are brightly modern in diction if not in thought. Pope’s idea is not so much that his contemporaries are unworthy of long life as that changes in taste and language will soon make their work obsolete. He pleads for his contemporaries, yet like many another critic he is _laudator temporis acti_, a praiser of times past and done. His injunction that we befriend and commend our neighbor’s merit before it speedily perishes is generous but fails to recognize that merit, true merit, does not die. This is certainly true in our time when books are so easily manifolded and come into so many hands that there is little likelihood of a real poet’s work being accidentally annihilated, or failing to find a reader somewhere in the world.