There seems to be a good deal of that about just now. One sees innumerable reviews of innumerable poets, which one supposes to be written by other poets, so solemnly do the writers take their topic and their author and themselves. And for the most part this writing bears the mark of “green, unknowing youth”—the bland assumption that literature was invented yesterday, and that, since the Armistice, we cannot but require a brand-new set of literary canons, estimates, and evaluations. Evidently our young warriors have come back from the front with their spirit of _camaraderie_ still glowing within them. Well, youth will be served, and we must resign ourselves, with a helpless shrug, to a deluge of crude over-estimates, enthusiastic magnifications of the ephemeral, and solemn examinations of the novels of Mr. X., Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. And we must be prepared to see the old reputations going down like a row of ninepins. We shall have to make a polite affectation of listening to the young gentlemen who dismiss Meredith as “pretentious” and tell us that Hardy “can’t write” and that Anatole France is _vieux jeu_. For if you are always adoring the new because it is new, then you may as well make a complete thing of it by decrying the old because it is old. The breath you can spare from puffing the “Georgians” up you may as well use for puffing the “Victorians” out. And thus the world wags. What is more, it is thus that the history of literature gets itself evolved. For it is time that I tried to see what good can be said of the coteries, as well as what ill, and this, I think, can be said for them—that they keep the ball rolling. It is they, with their foolish face of praise, who discover the new talents and begin the new movements. If you are always on the pounce for novelties you must occasionally “spot a winner” and find a novelty that the outer world ratifies into a permanency. The minor Elizabethan dramatists were once the darlings of a coterie, but Webster and one or two others still survive. The Lakists were once coterie poets, and, if Southey has petered out, Wordsworth remains. Of course they make awful “howlers.” A coterie started the vogue of that terribly tiresome “Jean Christophe,” of Romain Rolland, and where is it now? On the other hand, a coterie “discovered” Pater, and it was a real find; the world will not willingly let die “Marius” or the “Renaissance.” Henry James began as the idol of a coterie, and “The Golden Bowl” is not yet broken. It may be—who knows?—that the novels of Mr. X., Mrs. Y., and Miss Z. will by and by range themselves proudly on our shelves alongside Fielding and Jane and Meredith and Hardy.