later classicists, there was too often no spirit to look for.  The husk alone remained—­a finicky pretentious framework, fluttering with the faded rags of ideals long outworn.  Every great tradition has its own way of dying; and the classical tradition died of timidity.  It grew afraid of the flesh and blood of life; it was too polite to face realities, too elevated to tread the common ground of fact and detail; it would touch nothing but generalities, for they alone are safe, harmless, and respectable; and, if they are also empty, how can that he helped?  Starving, it shrank into itself, muttering old incantations; and it continued to mutter them, automatically, some time after it had expired.

But, in the heyday of the age of Louis XIV, literature showed no signs of such a malady—­though no doubt it contained the latent germs of the disease; on the contrary, the masterpieces of that epoch are charged to the full with vitality and force.  We may describe them, in one word, as worldly—­worldly in the broadest and the highest acceptation of the term.  They represent, in its perfect expression, the spirit of this world—­its greatness, its splendour, its intensity, the human drama that animates it, the ordered beauty towards which it tends.  For that was an age in which the world, in all the plenitude of its brilliance, had come into its own, when the sombre spirituality of the Middle Ages had been at last forgotten, when the literatures of Greece and Rome had delivered their benignant message, when civilization could enjoy for a space its new maturity, before a larger vision had brought questionings, and an inward vision aspirations unknown before.  The literature of those days was founded upon a general acceptance—­acceptance both in the sphere of politics and of philosophy.  It took for granted a fixed and autocratic society; it silently assumed the orthodox teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.  Thus, compared with the literature of the eighteenth century, it was unspeculative; compared with that of the Middle Ages, unspiritual.  It was devoid of that perception of the marvellous and awful significance of Natural phenomena which dominates the literature of the Romantic Revival.  Fate, Eternity, Nature, the destiny of Man, ’the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come’—­such mysteries it almost absolutely ignored.  Even Death seemed to lie a little beyond its vision.  What a difference, in this respect, between the literature of Louis XIV and the literature of Elizabeth!  The latter is obsessed by the smell of mortality; its imagination, penetrating to the depths and the heights, shows us mankind adrift amid eternities, and the whole universe the doubtful shadow of a dream.  In the former, these magnificent obscurities find no place:  they have been shut out, as it were, like a night of storm and darkness on the other side of the window.  The night is there, no doubt; but it is outside, invisible and neglected, while