Yet the judgment of an age may seem to us the veriest nonsense of perversity. It irritates us, at the same time that it flatters our sense of superiority, to see the citizens of the Seventeenth Century tossing up their caps over Cowley, and proclaiming him celestial; and to see those of the Eighteenth lose their heads over Pope. We know better. Cowley and Pope, indeed! Would not any college sophomore place them for us--Why, of course, Cowley wrote the _Sonnets of Pindar_, and Pope was a pseudonym. It is pedantic to have read them, and we are proud to know them only by reputation. Yet we must not blame our unfortunate ancestors. The old formula reappears:--they clung to what interested them, and called it deathless. The humor lies rather more in the inability of the next generation, perhaps our own, to break away from the stereotyped verdicts of those remote days of questionable authority. We were all taught that Addison was one of the mighty of earth, and that his style was the acme of lucidity and charm--"Spend your days and nights with Addison." But we must admit that this estimate is but the sluggish echo of auld lang syne. For have you, gentle reader, perused a single _Spectator_ Paper since you were preparing for your college examinations? Of course, if Addison really interested his own age by touching as no one else did its concerns, he deserved the audience he gathered about him and the fame that transpired; but why should we talk of him as if he actually interested us profoundly, when no one reads him? And how about _Tom Jones_ and _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _The Tale of a Tub_, and _Tristram Shandy_ or _The Vicar of Wakefield_? It is the tendency of long enduring fame to become sluggish and to sink into dogmatism.