In the nineteenth century pessimism about current literary productions was almost chronic, at least among professional critics. The Edinburgh Reviewers and the other Scotch terrier, Thomas Carlyle, set the whole century to growling at itself. Thoreau, with a humorous parenthesis to the effect that it is permissible to slander one’s own time, says that Elizabethan writers--and he seems to be speaking not of the poets but the prose writers--have a greater vigor and naturalness than the more modern, and that a quotation from an Elizabethan in a modern writer is like a green bough laid across the page. Stevenson says we are fine fellows but cannot write like Hazlitt (there is no reason why we should write like Hazlitt, or like anybody else in particular). Emerson, tolerant and generous toward his contemporaries, looks askance at new books, implies with an ambiguous “if” that “our times are sterile in genius,” and lays down as a practical rule, “Never read any book that is not a year old,”--which being translated means, “Encourage literature by starving your authors.” As we have said, most of the great authors are dead because most of the people ever born in this world are dead. And it is natural for bookmen to glance about their libraries, review the dignified backs of a hundred classics, and then, looking the modern world in the face, say, “Can any of you fellows do as well as these great ones?” To be sure, one age cannot rival the selected achievements of a hundred ages. But the Spirit of Literature is abroad in our garish modern times; she has been continuously occupied for at least three centuries in every civilized country in the world. And, as Pope pleads, let us welcome the labors of those whom the Spirit of Literature brushes with her wing.