When did it begin? In its primary form, no doubt it is a characteristic as old as literature itself. It is there, full-fledged, in Aristophanes. The Hebrew chroniclers and prophets had audacity of a sublime kind. Perhaps there were once wild young literary men in China, and no doubt many an impudent papyrus in Babylon and Ancient Egypt. But in the more questionable shape we know, audacity in literature is a thing only of yesterday and to-day. Going back, we come first to Wilde, who was nothing if not audacious, an impudent confidence-trick man-of-letters. Then, Stevenson and Henley, not without a touch, surely, though more audacious in the flesh perhaps than on paper. Again, Butler, a very clever man, perhaps a great man, but still a shockingly bad precedent for young men inclined to flippancy and petulance. There is Bagehot, whose genuine originality is not unspeckled; and further back, we see the young Disraeli, busy upon _Contarini Fleming_, and compounded of velveteen, macassar oil and impudence. And now we come to Blackwood’s young men, Christopher North and Company, beginning a career of literary swashbuckling with the _Chaldee MS._, and culprits one and all, triple-dyed in the fearful purple. And if a poetic criminal is wanted, there is Byron, who, from the sheer impertinence of _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ to the magnificent audacity of _Don Juan_, gives us every form of impudence rhymed and rhythmed; who began the game of making the bourgeois pay for being shocked, and continuously boiled his pot with the heat of their disapproval. But can we stop here? The graves stir, and a crowd of thin ghosts press forward, waving innumerable ragged volumes. There is the lean spectre of Yorick, and, close by, the author of _Jonathan Wild_, while a little way behind, one catches a glimpse of Swift, and Defoe, and Buckingham, and a hundred more. But their claims must be denied, for we must not fall into the error of using our make-shift term ‘audacity’ in its widest sense, and thereby running back to the Ptolemies in search of origins; we must save something for ourselves in literature, and we have already confessed that a certain audacious trick of writing belongs to our own age; so we will take our stand upon Byron and Blackwood’s merry men, and go no further.