The century, even if we are in full decadence (of which we are not the best judges), has been glorious in literature, and holds its own well with any in modern history. English itself has passed from the occasionally stilted Augustan survival, through the novelties of Macaulay, De Quincey, and Carlyle, and the early decorated of Mr. Ruskin, into slipshod slang in one extreme, and euphuism in the other. But the main stream keeps its course, and English may be written with perfect purity, and with new fluency and variety, by the men for whom the task is reserved by fate. But what does the century bequeath by way of intellectual motive? Little but the more or less transformed forces of the eighteenth century. There is science, but science, happily, is beginning to be aware that she is not really omniscient. Conceivably her foot is on the border of a new region, often surmised, never explored, full of light on the problems of spirit and matter. Hence, indeed, might come a new force in letters. Again, the social ideas of 1750–1800 may take practical shapes of incalculable momentousness, but these would not for long be favorable to literature. Or, less probably, the return on the past may assume practical shape, though this element of the later eighteenth century may seem, as far as letters go, to be exhausted. In brief, as I began by saying, the division of literary periods by measures of time is a cross-division. This peculiarity the last hundred years possess: that literature now blossoms on a far wider field. English-speaking America had, indeed, a literature long before the War of Independence; but it was not a literature for every reader of to-day. Now, and for long, the States have taken their own part in history, fiction, poetry, and all other branches of letters. Germany came back into world literature again just at the ending of the eighteenth century, after unregarded ages of neglect. Russia and the Scandinavian North awoke about the same time, and daily widen their influence, as does Belgium in the sunshine of Maeterlinck. France, of course, has in all time been in the foremost rank; while to balance America, Russia, and the North, Italy and Spain have scarcely held the place which through so many centuries was their own. Such changes in national literatures resemble the political waxings and wanings of national fortunes. The English-speaking peoples may have their eclipse; perhaps it is heralded by a modern comparative deficiency in humor which, if England and America cease to laugh, will die out of a profoundly solemn world.