In every age in which books have been produced the governing class, the respectable, have been opposed to the works of real genius. If what are known as the best people could have had their way, if the pulpit had been consulted--the provincial moralists--the works of Shakespeare would have been suppressed. Not a line would have reached our time. And the same may be said of every dramatist of his age. If the Scotch Kirk could have decided, nothing would have been known of Robert Burns. If the good people, the orthodox, could have had their say, not one line of Voltaire would now be known. All the plates of the French Encyclopedia would have been destroyed with the thousands that were destroyed. Nothing would have been known of D'Alembert, Grimm, Diderot, or any of the Titans who warred against the thrones and altars and laid the foundation of modern literature not only, but what is of far greater moment, universal education. It is not too much to say that every book now held in high esteem would have been destroyed, if those in authority could have had their will. Every book of modern times that has a real value, that has enlarged the intellectual horizon of mankind, that has developed the brain, that has furnished real food for thought, can be found in the Index Expurgatorius of the Papacy, and nearly every one has been commended to the free minds of men by the denunciations of Protestants. If the guardians of society, the protectors of "young persons," could have had their way, we should have known nothing of Byron or Shelley. The voices that thrill the world would now be silent. If authority could have had its way, the world would have been as ignorant now as it was when our ancestors lived in holes or hung from dead limbs by their prehensile tails. But we are not forced to go very far back. If Shakespeare had been published for the first time now, those divine plays--greater than continents and seas, greater even than the constellations of the midnight sky--would be excluded from the mails by the decision of the present enlightened postmaster-general. The poets have always lived in an ideal world, and that ideal world has always been far better than the real world. As a consequence, they have forever roused, not simply the imagination, but the energies--the enthusiasm of the human race. The great poets have been on the side of the oppressed--of the downtrodden. They have suffered with the imprisoned and the enslaved, and whenever and wherever man has suffered for the right, wherever the hero has been stricken down--whether on field or scaffold--some man of genius has walked by his side, and some poet has given form and expression, not simply to his deeds, but to his aspirations.