Contemporary poetry, for instance, on which Mr. Harrison bestows a good deal of hard language, has and must have, for the generation which produces it, certain qualities not likely to be possessed by any other.  Charles Lamb has somewhere declared that a pun loses all its virtues as soon as the momentary quality of the intellectual and social atmosphere in which it was born has changed its character.  What is true of this, the humblest effort of verbal art, is true in a different measure and degree of all, even of the highest, forms of literature.  To some extent every work requires interpretation to generations who are separated by differences of thought or education from the age in which it was originally produced.  That this is so with every book which depends for its interest upon feelings and fashions which have utterly vanished, no one will be disposed, I imagine, to deny.  Butler’s ‘Hudibras,’ for instance, which was the delight of a gay and witty society, is to me at least not unfrequently dull.  Of some works, no doubt, which made a noise in their day it seems impossible to detect the slightest race of charm.  But this is not the case with ‘Hudibras.’  Its merits are obvious.  That they should have appealed to a generation sick of the reign of the “Saints” is precisely what we should have expected.  But to us, who are not sick of the reign of the Saints, they appeal but imperfectly.  The attempt to reproduce artificially the frame of mind of those who first read the poem is not only an effort, but is to most people, at all events, an unsuccessful effort.  What is true of ‘Hudibras’ is true also, though in an inconceivably smaller degree, of those great works of imagination which deal with the elemental facts of human character and human passion.  Yet even on these, time does, though lightly, lay his hand.  Wherever what may be called “historic sympathy” is required, there will be some diminution of the enjoyment which those must have felt who were the poet’s contemporaries.  We look, so to speak, at the same splendid landscape as they, but distance has made it necessary for us to aid our natural vision with glasses, and some loss of light will thus inevitably be produced, and some inconvenience from the difficulty of truly adjusting the focus.  Of all authors, Homer would, I suppose, be thought to suffer least from such drawbacks.  But yet in order to listen to Homer’s accents with the ears of an ancient Greek, we must be able, among other things, to enter into a view about the gods which is as far removed from what we should describe as religious sentiment, as it is from the frigid ingenuity of those later poets who regarded the deities of Greek mythology as so many wheels in the supernatural machinery with which it pleased them to carry on the action of their pieces.  If we are to accept Mr. Herbert Spencer’s views as to the progress of our species, changes of sentiment are likely to occur which will even more seriously interfere with the world’s delight