My host replied—­“Do you not perceive that a literature such as you mean would be wholly incompatible with that perfection of social or political felicity at which you do us the honour to think we have arrived?  We have at last, after centuries of struggle, settled into a form of government with which we are content, and in which, as we allow no differences of rank, and no honours are paid to administrators distinguishing them from others, there is no stimulus given to individual ambition.  No one would read works advocating theories that involved any political or social change, and therefore no one writes them.  If now and then an An feels himself dissatisfied with our tranquil mode of life, he does not attack it; he goes away.  Thus all that part of literature (and to judge by the ancient books in our public libraries, it was once a very large part), which relates to speculative theories on society is become utterly extinct.  Again, formerly there was a vast deal written respecting the attributes and essence of the All-Good, and the arguments for and against a future state; but now we all recognise two facts, that there is a Divine Being, and there is a future state, and we all equally agree that if we wrote our fingers to the bone, we could not throw any light upon the nature and conditions of that future state, or quicken our apprehensions of the attributes and essence of that Divine Being.  Thus another part of literature has become also extinct, happily for our race; for in the time when so much was written on subjects which no one could determine, people seemed to live in a perpetual state of quarrel and contention.  So, too, a vast part of our ancient literature consists of historical records of wars an revolutions during the times when the Ana lived in large and turbulent societies, each seeking aggrandisement at the expense of the other.  You see our serene mode of life now; such it has been for ages.  We have no events to chronicle.  What more of us can be said than that, ‘they were born, they were happy, they died?’ Coming next to that part of literature which is more under the control of the imagination, such as what we call Glaubsila, or colloquially ‘Glaubs,’ and you call poetry, the reasons for its decline amongst us are abundantly obvious.

“We find, by referring to the great masterpieces in that department of literature which we all still read with pleasure, but of which none would tolerate imitations, that they consist in the portraiture of passions which we no longer experience—­ambition, vengeance, unhallowed love, the thirst for warlike renown, and suchlike.  The old poets lived in an atmosphere impregnated with these passions, and felt vividly what they expressed glowingly.  No one can express such passions now, for no one can feel them, or meet with any sympathy in his readers if he did.  Again, the old poetry has a main element in its dissection of those complex mysteries of human character which conduce to abnormal vices and crimes,