further talking in the day to come. It is talk usually commonplace, sometimes clever, occasionally sincere; of a society desirous of being interested, more often finding itself bored, filled with a resolute conviction that it must “play the game”; that this is the game to be played, that it must be played resolutely to the end. Elemental things occasionally intrude, marriages, and those unexpected deaths which refuse to postpone themselves to a more convenient out-of-season. What does it all mean? No one knows. What does it all come to? Again, no one knows. To many it stands for the inevitable, as the factory life is inevitable to some, the field drudgery to others. A few it stimulates with a consciousness of power in human intercourse and the subtle sensation of rejoicing in a crowd. To a tiny remnant alone it presents the appearance of a complicated machine, which has escaped the control of all human volition, and is progressing towards no intelligible goal; of some black windmill, with gigantic wings, rotating untended under the huge spaces of night. It is not illuminated by high ardours. It is not disfigured by great crimes. The criticism of its “smartness,” its vulgarity, its selfishness, advanced largely by women novelists and unfamiliar critics, is based upon a biassed reading of values. There are those who are pushing to get in, as there are those who are pushing to get out. There are egoisms here as in all human energies; revolts which drive their victims outside the accepted standards; reactions which find expression in a petulance or a despair. Neither to-day nor to-morrow will this strange turmoil stand for anything conformable to the record of various pleasure-loving societies, which from time to time have lived and flourished and died. But if its viciousness be but the palest reflection of similar past efforts, its activities and devotions are also set in grey. It has none of the fury of passionate pleasure which accompanied the decline and fall of Rome; but it has little of the large utterance, and magnificence of artistic display, and consciousness of occupying a great arena in the world’s affairs, which speaks from every day’s record of that long autumn of decay. It has few of those feverish and almost unintelligible lusts and cruelties which make the story of the Early Renaissance in Italy like the memory of evil dreams. But, on the other hand, it will neither stamp upon the stone and marble of its dwelling-places, nor store up upon the walls of its cities and opulent houses, nor write in the life history of its men and women, that harvest of an artistic beginning and a rich individual experience which makes the Renaissance appear as one of the wonder-ages of the world. To-day, here, in England, it plays and trifles with large forces which, if it once understood, it might flee from in terror and dismay. Its social and philanthropic enterprises are fairly ample; it