The point is that his new respectability is just as insecure as his old infamy--that he may be heaved out, on some bright to-morrow, just as he was heaved in, and by a similar combination of purely non-literary forces. Already I hear rumors of a plan to make Dr. Coolidge King. If his conscience stays him, then the throne may go to William Wrigley, Jr., or Judge Elbert H. Gary, LL.D. Democracy, indeed, begins to sicken among us. The doctors at its bedside dose it out of a black bottle, and make sinister signals to the coroner. If it dies, then Whitman will probably die with it. Criticism, of course, will labor desperately to save him, as it once labored to dispose of him, but such struggles are nearly always futile. The most they ever accomplish is to convert the author defended into a sort of fossil, preserved in a showcase to plague and puzzle schoolboys. The orthodox literature books, used in all schools, are simply such showcases. They represent the final effort of pedants to capture zephyrs and chain torrents. They are monuments to the delusion that criticism may be definitive--that appeals to the emotions, which shift and change with every wind, may be appraised and sorted out by appeals to the mind, which is theoretically unchangeable. Certainly every reflective student of any of the fine arts should know that this is not so. There is no such thing as a literary immortality. We remember Homer, but we forget the poets that the Greeks, too, forgot. You may be sure that there were Shakespeares in Carthage, and more of them at the court of Amenophis IV, but their very names are lost. Our own Shakespeare, as year chases year, may go the same way; in fact, his going the same way is quite as certain as anything we can imagine. A thousand years hence, even five hundred years hence, he may be, like Beowulf, only a name in a literature book, to be remembered against examination day and then forgotten.