Already we are ceasing to read the classics. The Latin and Greek quotation has passed from the leading article and the debate in Parliament. The past is being rapidly immersed in the ever-widening flood of modern literature. The past and present are always at war with one another. China has produced no poetry for two thousand years. “There is already,” they say, “so immense a collection of excellent work that it would be a folly to attempt to add to it.” In China the past has stifled and killed the present. Here in the western world we are busy making an end of Greece and Rome. Will anyone be reading Virgil in the nineteen-eighties? And of Shakespeare as of Virgil. We are always asking ourselves, “Who will be reading what in 1980?” We have always in our minds that unborn generation that we would influence and address. But either way, does it matter very much? These buildings of ours, these restaurants, and shops, and cinemas, that we are flinging up on all sides of us so recklessly, so haphazardly for purposes of convenience and display, they will speak of us far more distinctly to the men and women of the twenty-second century than these poems and plays and pictures, this music and these novels that we are producing in such profusion. Contemporary political thought, and its resulting bills and measures and defences, will be as obsolete as is to-day the policy of Gladstone. Our points of issue in religion and morality will doubtless be the occasion for music-hall derision. But our buildings will be there; and as, to the majority of us to-day, the sense of Augustan repose and polish and formality is most easily suggested by the rectangular windows and low lines of London squares; and as the vulgarity, and the pretentiousness, solemnity, and solidity that were the worst characteristics of the Early Victorian age are forced continually on our attention by the elaborate porticos and columns, the theatricality of over-decoration that obscure for us so much that was at that time excellent and that make us exclaim contemptuously, “How typically Victorian,” so shall we too in our turn be judged.