that when we read our newspapers we are not learning the views of Europe on a certain point,—­we are absorbing the ideas of the editor, to whom everything must be submitted before insertion in the oracular columns we pin our faith on!  Thus it is that criticism,—­literary criticism, at any rate,—­is a lost art,—­you know that.  A man must either be dead (or considered dead) or in a ‘clique’ to receive any open encouragement at all from the so-called ‘crack’ critics.  And the cliquey men are generally such stupendous bigots for their own particular and restricted form of ‘style.’  Anything new they hate,—­anything daring they treat with ridicule.  Some of them have no hesitation in saying they prefer Matthew Arnold (remember he’s dead!) to Tennyson and Swinburne (as yet living).. while, as a fact, if we are to go by the high standards of poetical art left us by Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, and Byron, Matthew Arnold is about the very tamest, most unimaginative, bald bard that ever kindled a lucifer match of verse and fancied it the fire of Apollo!  It’s utterly impossible to get either a just or broad view of literature out of cliques,—­and the Press, like many of our other ‘magnificent’ institutions, is working entirely on a wrong system.  But who is going to be wise, or strong, or diplomatic enough to reform it? ...  No one, at present,—­and we shall jog along, and read up the details of vice in our dailies and weeklies, till we almost lose the savor of virtue, and till the last degraded end comes of it all, and blatant young America thrones herself on the shores of Britain and sends her eagle screech of conquest echoing over Old World and New.”

“Don’t think it, Villiers!” exclaimed Alwyn impetuously..  “There is a mettle in the English that will never be conquered!”

Villiers shrugged his shoulders.  “We will hope so, my dear boy!” he said resignedly.  “But the ‘mettle’ under bad government, with bad weapons, and more or less untried ships, can scarcely be blamed if it should not be able to resist a tremendous force majeure.  Besides, all the Parliaments in the world cannot upset the laws of the universe.  If things are false and corrupt, they must be swept away,—­Nature will not have them,—­she will transmute and transform them somehow, no matter at what cost.  It is the cry of the old Prophets over again,—­’Because ye have not obeyed God’s Law, therefore shall ye meet with destruction.’  Egoism is certainly not God’s Law, and we shall have to return on our imagined progressive steps, and be beaten with rods of affliction, till we understand what His Law is.  It is, for one thing, the wheel that keeps this Universe going—­our laws are no use whatever in the management of His sublime cosmos!  Nations, like individuals, are punished for their own wilful misdeeds—­the punishment may be tardy, but sure as death it comes.  And I fancy America will be our ’scourge in the Lord’s hand’—­as the Bible hath