But let Bellows’ Dictionary, a friend and instructor of riper years, close my list of great examples and my theme.  The criticism is apposite to myself, and its only oddity—­its Elethian quality, if I may say so—­is its presence in that marvellous miniature whose ingenious author you would never suspect could have found room for such portentous observations in the small duodecimo to which he confined himself:—­

Unaffected language is the inseparable accompaniment of natural refinement; but that affectation which would make up for paucity of thought by overstrained expression is a mark of vulgarity from which no accident of social position can redeem those who are guilty of it.

To MORE ADEY, ESQ.

THERE IS NO DECAY.

A Lecture delivered in the Old Bluecoat School, Liverpool, on February 12th, 1908.

’In every age there is some question raised as to its wants and powers, its strength and weakness, its great or small worth and work; and in every age that question is waste of time and speech.  To a small soul the age which has borne it can appear only as an age of small souls; the pigmy brain and emasculate spirit can perceive in its own time nothing but dwarfishness and emasculation.  Each century has seemed to some of its children an epoch of decadence and decline in national life and spiritual, in moral or material glory; each alike has heard the cry of degeneracy raised against it, the wave of emulous impotence set up against the weakness of the age.’—­SWINBURNE.

Before the invention of printing, or let me say before the cheapening of printing, the lecturer was in a more fortunate position than he is to-day; because, if a learned man, he was able to give his audience certain pieces of information which he could be fairly sure some of his listeners had never heard before.  The arrival in town or city of Abelard, Paracelsus, or Erasmus, to take the first instances occurring to me, must have been a great event, the importance of which we can scarcely appreciate at the present day.  It must have excited our forefathers, at least as much as the arrival of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in any large city, excites I imagine, all of us to-day.  But multiplication of books has really rendered lecturers, as instructors, mere intellectual Othellos; their occupation is gone; the erudition of the ages is now within reach of all; though educational books were fairly expensive within living memory.  You owe, therefore, a debt of gratitude to the Times and the Daily Mail for bringing Encyclopaedias of all kinds into the range of the shallowest purse and in contact with the shallowest heads in the community.