effect's sake, spectacles, which invited the attention of those who make it their business to suppress public nuisances. We have had also theories in vogue the effects of which on mind and heart were such, and were foredoomed to be such, as to wither many talents in the bud. A single positive trend in English literature we do not ask and it is not necessarily desirable. We have heard the complaint from critics of the Gallic school that even in the days of the marvellously fertile English "Romantic generation" there was no one "movement," no Ten Commandments, and everybody was at sixes and sevens. That is the national way, and it probably accounts for our possession of the greatest and most varied imaginative literature that exists. Nevertheless, anarchy is not desirable, nor that worthy frame of mind which extends toleration not merely to the good of all kinds, but to the good and the bad, the intelligent and the foolish indifferently. And surely this toleration has been too commonly in evidence in this country in our time. Is the contention disputed? Is the fact other than self-evident? Is it necessary to explain and to accentuate the confusion which for the last ten years has been evident in the creative and in the critical literature of this country? There have been, as there always are, writers who have cheerfully continued writing as their predecessors have written, serious parodists of Milton, of Tennyson, and of George Eliot. These least of all can be said to be in the tradition of English letters; for that tradition has been a tradition of constant experiment and renovation. There has been a central body of writers--from Mr. Hardy, Mr. Bridges, and Mr. Conrad to the best of the younger poets--who have gone steadily along the sound path, traditional yet experimental, personal yet sane. But there has been also a large number of young writers who have strayed and lost themselves amongst experiments, many of them foredoomed to sterility. Young men, ignoring the fundamental truth expressed in the maxim, "Look in thy heart and write," have attempted to make up poems (and pictures) "out of their heads." Others, defying the obvious postulate that all good writing will carry at least a superficial meaning to the intelligent reader, have invited us to admire strings of disconnected words and images, meaningless and even verbless. Others, turning their backs on those natural affections and primary interests the repudiation of which means, and must always mean, the death of the highest forms of literature, have concentrated upon the subversion of every belief by which man lives. They have sapped at the bases of every loyalty, and sneered at every code, oblivious to both social welfare and social experience. They have been, such of them as profess the moralistic preoccupation, very contemptuous of "clean living and no thinking," but the dirty living and muddled thinking that they have offered as a substitute have been no great improvement.