It is a curious time to look back upon to-day. Curious to read the newspapers, reviews and comic papers of the time; to find, for instance, in the _Observer_ a leading article on the last novel of Mrs. Humphry Ward, as if it were a European event, and one the next Sunday on “What is the modern girl coming to, for she opens her front door with a key?” To come, too, on reviews of Mr. Hall Caine’s “Manxman,” such as that by Mr. Edmund Gosse in the _St. James’ Gazette_--“A contribution to literature, and the most fastidious critic would give in exchange for it a wilderness of that deciduous trash which our publishers call fiction. It is not possible to part from it without a warm tribute of approval.” But how possible it has now become! Indeed, in our times it has been known that a certain author, having in an unguarded hour committed to print an appreciation of this famous writer, and then having learnt his mistake, has changed his name and started life again, unable otherwise to support his disgrace. _Autres temps, autres mœurs._ Certainly the nineties were a long time ago. Strange, too, to read some of the contemporary press comments on that innocent, well-produced, extremely well-illustrated, and on the whole capable periodical, the _Yellow Book_--“the outcry,” as Mr. Arthur Symons put it later, when the publication of the _Savoy_ was greeted with much the same noise, “the outcry for no reason in the world but the human necessity for making a noise.” You would think that the worst that could be said of the _Yellow Book_ was that it was not eclectic, that it opened its hospitable doors to the worse writers as well as to the better, and that its intellectually lowest contributions were too widely sundered from its highest; and the best that could be said for it (and how much this is!) is that Aubrey Beardsley drew for it, Henry James and Max Beerbohm wrote prose for it, and W. B. Yeats poetry, and that it had, on the whole, some of the more capable writers of the day as contributors. But, in point of fact, the best that was said of it was that it was brilliant, daring, courageous, new and intensely modern, and the worst that it was bizarre, revolting, affected, new and decadent. It appears to a later generation to have been none of these things; that is, it was brilliant in patches only, and commonplace in patches; it was not daring except in that it is greatly daring to publish any periodical ever; it was not more intensely modern than everything always is, and most of its contributors were middle-aged; its weak and trite contributions (though indeed it did at times sink pretty low) were too few to allow of the word revolting being properly applied to the whole magazine, even by him whom Mr. Gosse called, in another context, the most fastidious critic; and as for decadent, this it may, indeed, have been, as no one has ever discovered what, if anything, this word, as generally used at this time, meant. Exhibiting