You may hear it sinking to a deep note of strong repudiation, in that vision of a city, “perchance of Death but certainly of Night,” from the heart of which, in the pulpit of a great cathedral, a strange preacher proclaims the triumph of night and its despairs. One observer looking to the future will see “the whole life of the immense majority of its inhabitants, from infancy to the grave, a dreary routine of soulless, mechanical labor.” Another will call for a cosmic cataclysm to quickly make an end. Another in a more chilling indifference will turn away from the unlovely sight as from a spectacle irrelevant, impossible. Literature has no tolerance for the existence of comfort and security which to so many people seems the last word of human welfare. And no reconstruction, from the works of genius, the great novelists, artists, critics, of the vanishing present, can provide any judgment much more satisfying to our pride than the judgment of summarised theft and fraud and violence which is the weekly enjoyment of many million readers. We know--at once--that this is a one-sided verdict. Of ten thousand citizens, all but three or four will pass their lives unchronicled; and these three or four--a murderer, an adulterer, an adventurer, a saint--will come to stand alone as lives whose existence is recorded. The remainder pursue their brave and patient labours, not too exacting in ideal, not too clamorous in pleasure, not at the end having very much to complain of, or being very eager to complain. So--in every civilisation, in every century, have passed the lives of the multitude of mankind. Yet it is change--obscure change in economic conditions, in aspirations, in faiths, in energies or lassitudes--which is responsible for the rise and fall of nations, for the variegated panorama of an ever-changing world. We have enjoyed in England security and settled society since the period of the great Civil War. For two hundred and fifty years ten generations have flourished and faded in a universe where regular government and an ordered apparatus of justice have guaranteed that life shall be reasonably safe, and that foresight shall attain reward. We are coming to believe that no circumstance will ever arise in which an insurance policy will not be honoured on presentation, and contracts entered into by the parents be fulfilled by the children. Yet during the whole of this period there have been cataclysms of change in the intimate life and convictions of the people which are more instinctive than opinions. So that the nineteenth-century civilisation is far removed from the eighteenth, and the twentieth from the nineteenth, in the estimate of the kingdom of the Soul. A study of those changes--a revelation and diagnosis of the hidden life of England--would be a study exceedingly worth attempting to-day. It would be a study which, passing from the external organisation, the condition of trade, the variation in fortune, would