Yet, experiment or remainder, imitation or original, one cannot but feel that the book, like all the literature to which it belongs, has more of the marks of death than of life in it. Its very elegances are "rose-coloured curtains for the doctors"--the masque of a moribund art. Some of them may have been borrowed by, rather than from, younger and hopefuller craftsmanship, but the general effect is the same. We are here face to face with those phenomena of "decadence," which, though they have often been exaggerated and wrongly interpreted, yet surely exist and reappear at intervals--the contortions of style that cannot afford to be natural, the tricks of word borrowed from literary reminiscence ([Greek: holos] itself in this way is at least as old as Lucian), the tormented effort at detail of description, at "analysis" of thought and feeling, of incident and moral. The cant phrase about being "_ne trop tard dans un monde trop vieux_" has been true of many persons, while more still have affected to believe it true of themselves, since Eustathius: it is not much truer of any one than of him. Curious as such specimens of a dying literature may be, it cannot but be refreshing to go westward from it to the nascent literatures of Italy and of Spain, literatures which have a future instead of merely a past, and which, independently of that somewhat illegitimate advantage, have characteristics not unable to bear comparison with those of the past, even had it existed. [Sidenote: _Lateness of Italian._]