Authors, like inventors, are rarely more than discoverers. If God, who is omniscient, sees all truth, and apprehends the relations of every truth to every other truth, all an author can do is, of course, to find out what God's thoughts are. And every age is certain to find out the thought that is essential to it. When the world had exhausted Aristotle, and the wide school of philosophers who embraced him in their systems, Bacon, self-instituted, stepped before the world as its teacher. He came when he was wanted, and his age gave him audience, and took the better path which he pointed out to it. It was in the golden age of the drama--the age in which the drama was what it never was before, and will never be again--a great agent of civilization--that Shakspeare appeared. We call his plays creations, but surely they were not his. He no more than discovered them. The reason why they stir us so much is that God created them. His age wanted them, and he had the insight into the world of thought which enabled him to enter in and lead them out. The reason why we have not had any great dramatist since, is, that succeeding ages have not needed one. The great men of later ages have not recognized the drama as a want of their particular time. I am aware that there is nothing in this to feed human pride, but I do not recognize food for human pride as a want of any age. We are in the habit of talking of the old authors; and we read them as if we supposed them wiser than ourselves. We try to feed on the thought which they discovered, but it is in the main very innutritious fodder, and the world is learning the fact. We read and reverence old books less, and read and regard newspapers a great deal more. The thought which our own age produces is that which we are learning to prize most. We buy beautiful editions of Scott, but we read Dickens and Thackeray and Mrs. Stowe, in weekly and monthly numbers. Milton, in half-calf, stands upon the shelves of our library undisturbed, while we cut the leaves of "Festus;" and Keats and Byron and Shelley are all pushed aside that we may converse with Longfellow and Mrs. Browning. It is not, perhaps, that the later are the greater, but, being informed with the spirit of the age in which we have our life, moving among the facts which concern us, and conscious of our want, they apprehend the true relations of their age to the world of thought around them. They see where the sources of oil are exhausted, and bore for new deposits. It is a comfort to know that they can never bore in vain.