For are the tastes of a man of fifty any more permanent than those of a man of twenty-five? Can we not still say to him: “You will feel differently when you are older. You will look back to the person that you now are as to a stranger: to a man with different affections, different ambitions, and a different way of living. These present enthusiasms of yours will in their turn pass, we can assure you. They will pass into the tepid preferences of old age, and you will sit in the smoking-room of your club, the chief pleasure of your life an immunity from gout, the chief problem of it the avoidance of a draught.” Can we, with any greater justice, condemn the problems of twenty before the tribunal of forty-five than we can those of fifty before those of eighty? The brain is not useless now because it will one day soften; teeth not inefficacious because they will eventually decay. The young man will hardly listen to the impotent antiquity who assures him that the charm of woman is a snare and an illusion. “When you have reached my age it will no longer move you.” In a world of fugitive sensation there is no fixed point at which anyone can say, “thus far and no farther.” We have a right to our own age; to the problems, the turmoil, the compensating enthusiasms of our age, and we have an equal right to the literature best suited for their nourishment and inspiration. In the same way a particular period has a right to the literature best suited to its needs. Books follow a wave of recurrent popularity and depreciation. The masterpiece of 1820 is the Aunt Sally of 1850, but by 1880 it has been restored to favour. “The masterpiece is the mood, and all moods pass save Shakespeare and the Bible.” This from George Moore. But of Shakespeare, as of others. He had little, or nothing, to say to the eighteenth century: to that unrivalled period of elegance and polish. They re-wrote “King Lear”: they made it end happily with Cordelia in Edgar’s arms. Shakespeare’s tragedy was described by Mr Tate in the dedicatory epistle to his own version “as a heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished, yet so dazzling in their disorder that I soon perceived that I had seized a treasure.” We are inclined to smile at such ridiculous folly. “So that is all they knew,” we say. But I think Mr Tate did wisely to rewrite “King Lear” in the idiom of his own time. The eighteenth century which produced Swift, and Addison, and Pope, was not less cultured than the century that produced Shakespeare, and Donne, and Milton, and compares very favourably with ours that has produced--but I will not be personal. It is enough to say that the eighteenth century had a perfect right to say: “This is what we like.” It could justify by its creations its exclusiveness. And, at the time, it was so very certain it was right--as certain as we are to-day that Clifford Bax is abundantly justified in the slaughter of Mr Gay’s dialogue and verses that he has made in his new version of “Polly.”