But the centuries to come, of which the fluttering, chirping gentlemen are prone to talk largely, will have something to say in the matter.  And when they, the future centuries, quest back to the nineteenth century to find what manner of century it was—­to find, not what the people of the nineteenth century thought they thought, but what they really thought, not what they thought they ought to do, but what they really did do, then a certain man, Kipling, will be read—­and read with understanding.  “They thought they read him with understanding, those people of the nineteenth century,” the future centuries will say; “and then they thought there was no understanding in him, and after that they did not know what they thought.”

But this is over-severe.  It applies only to that class which serves a function somewhat similar to that served by the populace of old time in Rome.  This is the unstable, mob-minded mass, which sits on the fence, ever ready to fall this side or that and indecorously clamber back again; which puts a Democratic administration into office one election, and a Republican the next; which discovers and lifts up a prophet to-day that it may stone him tomorrow; which clamours for the book everybody else is reading, for no reason under the sun save that everybody else is reading it.  This is the class of whim and caprice, of fad and vogue, the unstable, incoherent, mob-mouthed, mob-minded mass, the “monkey-folk,” if you please, of these latter days.  Now it may be reading The Eternal City.  Yesterday it was reading The Master Christian, and some several days before that it was reading Kipling.  Yes, almost to his shame be it, these folk were reading him.  But it was not his fault.  If he depended upon them he well deserves to be dead and buried and never to rise again.  But to them, let us be thankful, he never lived.  They thought he lived, but he was as dead then as he is now and as he always will be.

He could not help it because he became the vogue, and it is easily understood.  When he lay ill, fighting with close grapples with death, those who knew him were grieved.  They were many, and in many voices, to the rim of the Seven Seas, they spoke their grief.  Whereupon, and with celerity, the mob-minded mass began to inquire as to this man whom so many mourned.  If everybody else mourned, it were fit that they mourn too.  So a vast wail went up.  Each was a spur to the other’s grief, and each began privately to read this man they had never read and publicly to proclaim this man they had always read.  And straightaway next day they drowned their grief in a sea of historical romance and forgot all about him.  The reaction was inevitable.  Emerging from the sea into which they had plunged, they became aware that they had so soon forgotten him, and would have been ashamed, had not the fluttering, chirping men said, “Come, let us bury him.”  And they put him in a hole, quickly, out of their sight.