with it.  Immediate popularity, or currency, is a nearly valueless criterion of merit.  The settling of high rank even in the popular mind does not necessarily give currency; the so-called best authors are not those most widely read at any given time.  Some who attain the position of classics are subject to variations in popular and even in scholarly favor or neglect.  It happens to the princes of literature to encounter periods of varying duration when their names are revered and their books are not read.  The growth, not to say the fluctuation, of Shakespeare’s popularity is one of the curiosities of literary history.  Worshiped by his contemporaries, apostrophized by Milton only fourteen years after his death as the “dear son of memory, great heir to fame,”

    “So sepulchred in such pomp dost lie,
     That kings, for such a tomb, would wish to die,”

he was neglected by the succeeding age, the subject of violent extremes of opinion in the eighteenth century, and so lightly esteemed by some that Hume could doubt if he were a poet “capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined and intelligent audience,” and attribute to the rudeness of his “disproportioned and misshapen” genius the “reproach of barbarism” which the English nation had suffered from all its neighbors.  Only recently has the study of him by English scholars—­I do not refer to the verbal squabbles over the text—­been proportioned to his preeminence, and his fame is still slowly asserting itself among foreign peoples.

There are already signs that we are not to accept as the final judgment upon the English contemporaries of Irving the currency their writings have now.  In the case of Walter Scott, although there is already visible a reaction against a reaction, he is not, at least in America, read by this generation as he was by the last.  This faint reaction is no doubt a sign of a deeper change impending in philosophic and metaphysical speculation.  An age is apt to take a lurch in a body one way or another, and those most active in it do not always perceive how largely its direction is determined by what are called mere systems of philosophy.  The novelist may not know whether he is steered by Kant, or Hegel, or Schopenhauer.  The humanitarian novel, the fictions of passion, of realism, of doubt, the poetry and the essays addressed to the mood of unrest, of questioning, to the scientific spirit and to the shifting attitudes of social change and reform, claim the attention of an age that is completely adrift in regard to the relations of the supernatural and the material, the ideal and the real.  It would be natural if in such a time of confusion the calm tones of unexaggerated literary art should be not so much heeded as the more strident voices.  Yet when the passing fashion of this day is succeeded by the fashion of another, that which is most acceptable to the thought and feeling of the present may be without an audience; and it may happen that few recent authors will be read as Scott and the writers of the early part of this century will be read.  It may, however, be safely predicted that those writers of fiction worthy to be called literary artists will best retain their hold who have faithfully painted the manners of their own time.