As “Ever since the days of Captain Kidd, the Yankees think there’s money hid,” so ever since the disappearance of Molière’s library the bibliophiles think there’s treasure hid. Only one book which belonged to that prince of bibliophiles has turned up so far, a little Elzevir of 1651, in which he obligingly wrote his name and the price, 1 _livre_, 10 _sous_. But think of his two hundred and forty odd comedies which he handled so deftly both in the letter and in the spirit, “taking his property wherever he found it!” What pearls of price if one could only trace them! We know this collection was broken up; it cannot be that every single book has perished. One is almost justified in counting such chickens before they are hatched. Molière was not only one of the greatest but one of the most lovable of authors—that quality we collectors value so highly! Why a book of his would be like a relic of a saint (there is a bit of mediævalism in every good bibliophile); a saint, a bibliophile of other days, an actor, a gentle reader and a genius! What might not any one of them bring? Ah, there is still a golden fleece for the quest of the Romantic Modern. Romance will always deal in talismans. We bibliophiles make ours a thing of the mind, which we lay away between the lines of some gentle old volume, hoping that some day, somewhere in the vague realm of Books, it may work its pleasant magic upon some unknown comrade. _The Romantic Twentieth Century: A Deduction_ The simple story-tellers of old, singing away before History was born, long, long before she became contradictory and disrespectful, chose the past as a setting for certain beatitudes—love, beauty, valor, fidelity and justice. Theirs was not the harsh justice of the common law, for there was no common law, but true, or, as the world terms it, poetic justice. They strengthened the warp of their story with the noblest deeds done, or almost done, around them, for human beings so often fall just short of great things; this it is the gentle and honorable duty of story to remedy, for “What we would be, that we are for one transcendent moment.” When they only recorded the prowess of the victor, History and Romance were one and at peace, and the glorious days of which together they sung were known as the Golden Age. Then History began to feel the heroism of the vanquished. To give them their meed she conceived the idea of recording impartially the good and evil around her, whereat childish Romance turned from her in disgust. But each claimed the Golden Age: Romance declaring that golden tales that live and grow were hers for all time; History declaring that the fact that a great poet imagined an event to have happened counted for more in the human record than any other given occurrence. And History and Romance quarreled on until it seemed as though the Golden Age would be lost to both of them.