Doubtless they said much the same of Mr Tate two hundred years ago. To the dandy of 1720 it seemed as impossible that Lear should die as is to-day the execution of Macheath. And, as Clifford Bax has found in Polly’s misfortunes the single string on which might be threaded the characters and incidents that would have been otherwise irrelevant, so Mr Tate discovered in the love of Edgar for Cordelia the missing unity of Lear. Mr Gay’s Polly was as impossible to-day as Mr Shakespeare’s Lear was in 1720. In 2020 who knows but Mr Tate’s version will be upon the boards of the Lyric, Hammersmith, and His Majesty’s will be staging an unexpurgated Gay. Each age takes the food it needs. Like wine in bottles, some books deteriorate and others mature. And, indeed, what is this posterity that we should so appeal to it? Are we not ourselves fallible and imperfect mortals, posterity to the Victorians? I can see Browning walking with Tennyson in the Elysian Fields. They discuss the literary journalism of their day. “It was bad,” Browning mumbles into his beard,--“very bad indeed. There was a silly fellow called John Stuart Mill--what was it he said about that first book of mine? ‘Most self-conscious thing he’d ever read.’ But I didn’t worry. I looked ahead. I was content to let posterity decide; and I have my reward. I read last week such a charming thing about me by, let me see now, a very vigorous young person I thought--ah, yes, Miss Rebecca West....” The other day I listened for upwards of a quarter of an hour to the complaint of a young poet whose works had been mishandled grievously in the _London Mercury_. Highly did he heap abuse on the heads of Mr J. C. Squire and Mr Edward Shanks; nor was he less generous to critics unconnected with that periodical: to Middleton Murry, and T. S. Eliot, and Robert Lynd; one by one they were presented to the lash of ridicule. Finally the injured poet turned a loving, a valedictory eye towards the great men of the past--Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, Emerson, Carlyle. “There,” he said, “were critics for you.” And, after a pause: “Ah, well, in fifty years’ time....” And he shrugged his shoulders as one who can afford to ignore such triflings in the face of time.