A general statement of the law that governs literary history may perhaps be borrowed from the most unreasonable of the arts--the art of dress. One of the powerful rulers of men, and therefore of books, is Fashion, and the fluctuations of literary fashion make up a great part of literary history. If the history of a single fashion in dress could ever be written, it would illuminate the literary problem. The motives at work are the same; thoughtful wearers of clothes, like thoughtful authors, are all trying to do something new, within the limits assigned by practical utility and social sympathy. Each desires to express himself and yet in that very act to win the admiration and liking of his fellows. The great object is to wear the weeds of humanity with a difference. Some authors, it is true, like timid or lazy dressers, desire only to conform to usage. But these, as M. Brunetiere remarks in one of his historical essays, are precisely the authors who do not count. An author who respects himself is not content if his work is mistaken for another's, even if that other be one of the gods of his idolatry. He would rather write his own signature across faulty work than sink into a copyist of merit. This eternal temper of self-assertion, this spirit of invention, this determination to add something or alter something, is no doubt the principle of life. It questions accepted standards, and makes of reaction from the reigning fashion a permanent force in literature. The young want something to do; they will not be loyal subjects in a kingdom where no land remains to be taken up, nor will they allow the praise of the dead to be the last word in criticism. Why should they paraphrase old verdicts? The sway of Fashion often bears hardest on a good author just dead, when the generation that discovered him and acclaimed him begins to pass away. Then it is not what he did that attracts the notice of the younger sort, but what he left undone. Tennyson is discovered to be no great thinker. Pope, who, when his star was in the ascendant, was "Mr. Pope, the new Poet," has to submit to examination by the Headmaster of Winchester, who decides that he is not a poet, except in an inferior sense. Shakespeare is dragged to the bar by Thomas Rymer, who demonstrates, with what degree of critical ability is still disputed, but certainly in clear and vigorous English, that Shakespeare has no capacity for tragic writing. Dante is banished, by the critics of the Renaissance, into the Gothic darkness. So the pendulum of fashion swings to and fro, compelled, even in the shortest of its variable oscillations, to revisit the greatest writers, who are nearest to the centre of rest. Wit and sense, which are raised by one age into the very essentials of good poetry, are denied the name of poetry by the next; sentiment, the virtue of one age, is the exploded vice of another; and Romance comes in and goes out with secular regularity.