Well, then, says the teacher of current literature, there never can be any great books, for you approve of nothing contemporary, and every book, unfortunately, has to be written in its own time. Yes, in a sense, anything you write, on however remote a subject, will be of your time and will represent it; Walter Pater was expressing one phase of Victorian England when he wrote _Marius the Epicurean_. But the artist hopes to appeal to more than the present generation; even the most contemporary of our contemporaries, who read no books of which the authors are not living, cherish some ambition to have their own works read after they themselves are gone. And since the fame of a book depends on its ability to meet the interest of readers over a long period of time, the life of our works will depend on two things—on our gift for selecting the matter which is permanently interesting to men, and on the willingness or unwillingness of any generation to be interested in the same things as its predecessors. If readers are now brought up to neglect as a matter of course any works of literature that once were loved, there will be no fame for any one hereafter, and no masters of the art, but only in each publishing season a nine days’ wonder. But if human nature still asserts its primal interests, in spite of mistaken teaching, and continues to like in the long run the same things that have been loved in the past, then the writer will finally be reckoned great who answers, not the mood of his hour, but the spirit of those constant demands. He will get his inspiration from life as he knows it; he will express it in an eternal form, as we say—at least in a form so durable that instead of our understanding his work through the incident that inspired it, we shall know of the incident through the work. Molière has so immortalized one moment of his times in his _Précieuses Ridicules_; without the play, would we know much of the temporary affectation? And to be quite frank, has not something died in the play, along with what was contemporary in it, so that we enjoy it now with an historical effort not needed to be at home, let us say, with Falstaff? Tennyson really immortalized the Charge of the Light Brigade, for the incident on so many grounds has since proved regrettable that we should be glad to forget it, but for the poem, and we begin to be sorry that the poem is anchored to so much that was transitory. Our own civil war poet, Henry Howard Brownell, true genius if we ever had one, wrote his verses on the very scene, after the fights he had passed through as Farragut’s secretary on the flagship, and the virulence of contemporary passion is in his work forever, an embarrassing alloy. But of the danger of being contemporary, Dante is the great illustration. It is not hard to see what an impact his great poem must have made on his first hearers, it was so immediate in its reference to persons, places, incidents, crimes and disasters which Florence, Rome