speech had been refined by sentiment, and the most graceful compliments glide, without effort, from the lips of the adept courtier. But even still, in the drawing-rooms of fashion, delicate morsels of scandal are discussed by his fine ladies with a freedom which is absolutely unknown to the Mayfair of the last half-century, where innuendo might be conveyed by the eye and suggested by the smile, but would never, so reticent has taste become, find the frank emphatic utterance which brought no blush to the cheek of Mrs. Candour and Lady Sneerwell. In the passage of time reticence has become more and more pronounced; and literature, moving, as it must, with the age, has assumed in its normal and wholesome form the degree of silence which it finds about it. The standard of taste in literature, then, so far as it responds to contemporary judgment, should be regulated by the normal taste of the hale and cultured man of its age: it should steer a middle course between the prudery of the manse, which is for hiding everything vital, and the effrontery of the pot-house, which makes for ribaldry and bawdry; and the more it approximates to the exact equilibrium of its period, the more thoroughly does it become representative of the best taste of its time, the more certain is it of permanent recognition. The literature of shortcoming and the literature of violence have their reward: "They have their day, and cease to be"; the literature which reflects the hale and wholesome frankness of its age can be read, with pleasure and profit, long after its openness of speech and outlook has ceased to reproduce the surrounding life. The environment is ephemeral, but the literature is immortal. But why is the literature immortal? Why is it that a play like _Pericles_, for instance, full as it is of scenes which revolt the moral taste, has lived and is a classic forever, while innumerable contemporary pieces of no less genius (for _Pericles_ is no masterpiece) have passed into oblivion? Why is it that the impurity of _Pericles_ strikes the reader scarcely at all, while the memory dwells upon its beauties and forgets its foulness in recollection of its refinement? The reason is not far to seek. _Pericles_ is not only free of offence when judged by the taste of its age, it is no less blameless when we subject it to the test by which all literature is judged at last; it conforms to the standard of art; it is permeated by the moral idea. The standard of art--the presence of the idea--the two expressions are, I believe, synonymous. It is easy enough to babble of the beauty of things considered apart from their meaning, it is easy enough to dilate on the satisfaction of art in itself, but all these phrases are merely collocations of terms, empty and meaningless. A thing can only be artistic by virtue of the idea it suggests to us; when the idea is coarse, ungainly, unspeakable, the object that suggests it is coarse, ungainly, unspeakable; art and ethics