a highly civilised age is the hurry and preoccupation which leave no time for the appreciative faculties to employ themselves. It has been very well said that the feature most inimical to art in American civilisation is the absence of a "leisure class." If there be any validity in the conclusions for which I have been trying to win acceptance [29] in the earlier chapters of this work, the new age will be an age of greatly increased leisure in all ranks, and this condition ought to favour art in every way as highly as the improvement in the nature as well as in the extent of education must also favour it. And in this there will be both action and reaction--increased leisure and improved appreciation tending to foster genius, genius in the glorious perfection of its work generously returning the benefit by cultivating and refining the æsthetic sense of the new age. Similarly in literature we may hope that the atrocious consequences of instruction applied to a vast number of minds which no attempt is made to educate will be only temporary. Popular "literature" and journalism at the present time might well strike with despair the most hopeful heart. But when we remember that no attempt whatever is being made to educate the faculty of imagination, and that we stubbornly restrict all teaching to a vehement effort to cram as many facts as possible into the mind of the scholar, with no endeavour at all to improve the qualities of that mind itself; and when we grant, as I think any reasonably intelligent prevision of the future must grant, that all this will before many decades have to give place to really educational processes: it seems evident that the future will gradually fling aside in deserved contempt the basely illiterate products of the printing press which enrich popular publishers and newspaper proprietors to-day, redeem poetry from its present practical neglect, and revive and enrich the belles lettres, which, even in the latter part of the nineteenth century and these latter years of the dawning twentieth century, have contrived to appear in masterpieces for which readers, fit, if few, have never ceased to exist. One result of this will be to end, and end for ever, the idiotic and reactionary policy of "limited editions" for beautiful books, by which alone, in many cases, the production of such books has been made possible. As the public for fine literature decently printed becomes gradually larger, there will no longer be any object in accentuating popular ignorance by withholding from the greatest part of the public the opportunity to possess and to enjoy the best work in letters that the age is producing, and it will be possible for the poet of delicate imagination, the essayist of subtle insight, and the story-teller of restrained and modest genius, to be as well paid as the inventors of nightmare horrors and the biographers of impossibly ingenious detectives apparently are to-day.