On the other hand, the benefits of democratic surroundings are felt in these middle walks of literature. The appeal to a very wide audience has the effect of giving a writer whose work is sound but not of universal interest, an opportunity of collecting, piecemeal, individual readers enough to support him. The average sanity of a democracy, and the habit it encourages of immediate, full, and candid discussion, preserves the writer whose snare is eccentricity from going too far in his folly. The celebrated eccentrics of past literature, the Lycophrons and the Gongoras, the Donnes and the Gombrevilles, were the spokesmen of small and pedantic circles, disdainful of the human herd, "sets" whose members rejoiced in the conceits and extravagance of their respective favourites, and encouraged these talented personages to make mountebanks of themselves. These leaders were in most cases excessively clever, and we find their work, or a little of it, very entertaining as we cross the history of _belles-lettres_. But it is impossible not to see that, for instance, each of the mysterious writers I have mentioned would, in a democratic age, and healthily confronted with public criticism, have been able to make a much wholesomer and broader use of his cleverness. The democratic spirit, moreover, may be supposed to encourage directness of utterance, simplicity, vividness, and lucidity. I say it may be supposed to do so, because I cannot perceive that with all our liberty the nineteenth century has proceeded any farther in this direction than the hide-bound eighteenth century was able to do. On the whole, indeed, I find it very difficult to discover that democracy, as such, is affecting the quality of such good literature as we possess in any very general or obvious way. It may be that we are still under the oligarchic tradition, and that a social revolution, introducing a sudden breach in our habits, and perhaps paralysing the profession of letters for a few years, would be followed by a new literature of a decidedly democratic class. We are speaking of what we actually see, and not of vague visions which may seem to flit across the spectral mirror of the future.