From what source, so ask ‘the frosty pows,’ are you who call yourselves ‘jolly candidates’ for 1900, going to get your supplies? Where are your markets? Who will crowd the theatre on your opening nights? What well-graced actors will then cross your stage? Your boys and girls will be well provided for, one can see that. Story-books and handbooks will jostle for supremacy; but your men and women, all a-hungered, how are you going to feed them and keep their tempers sweet? It is not a question of side dishes, but of joints. Sermons and sonnets, and even ‘clergy-poets,’ may be counted upon, but they will only affront the appetites they can never satisfy. What will be wanted are Sam Wellers, Captain Costigans, and Jane Eyres--poetry that lives, controversy that bites, speeches that stir the imagination. Thus far the aged century. To argue with it would be absurd; to silence it cruel, and perhaps impossible. Greedy Time will soon do that. But suppose it should turn out to be the fact that we are about to enter upon a period of well-cultivated mediocrity. What then? Centuries cannot be expected to go on repeating the symptoms of their predecessors. We have had no Burns. We cannot, therefore, expect to end with the beginnings of a Wordsworth and a Coleridge; there may likely be a lull. The lull may also be a relief. Of all odd crazes, the craze to be for ever reading new books is one of the oddest. Hazlitt may be found grappling with this subject, and, as usual, ‘punishing’ it severely in his own inimitable style. ‘I hate,’ says he, in the second volume of ‘The Plain Speaker’--in the essay entitled ‘On Reading Old Books’--‘to read new books;’ and he continues, a page further on, ‘Contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes--one’s friends or one’s foes. Of the first we are compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to think too ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or to judge fairly of the merit of either. One candidate for literary fame who happens to be of our acquaintance writes finely and like a man of genius, but unfortunately has a foolish face, which spoils a delicate passage; another inspires us with the highest respect for his personal talents and character, but does not come up to our expectations in print. All these contradictions and petty details interrupt the calm current of our reflections.’ Hazlitt was no doubt a good hater. We are now of milder mood. It ought not to be difficult for any of us, if we but struggle a little, to keep a man’s nose out of his novel. But, for all that, it is certain that true literary sway is borne but by the dead. Living authors may stir and stimulate us, provoke our energies, and excite our sympathy, but it is the dead who rule us from their urns. Authority has no place in matters concerning books and reading, else it would be well were some proportion fixed between the claims of living and dead authors.