critics could lay down a code of absolute laws and keep to the elaboration of a single type. In spite of that, it may be that the national taste will still assert itself. We plant, it is true, all manner of exotics, but only a few take root, and those in virtue of their suitability to our soil. But if the vision of our political Jeremiahs is to be fulfilled; if the inevitable growth of democracy means a growing uniformity and growing vulgarisation of the human being everywhere; if it implies, too, an indefinite multiplication of masses, in which the individual is insignificant, occupied by the same petty round of interests, and incapable of appreciating refinement or high intellectual powers, there can be no doubt that literature also will become commonplace and vulgar, and so far alike throughout the world. There may be reasons for thinking that, in point of fact, there is a strong temptation for men of genius to write down to a low level and produce literary shoddy instead of thorough works of art. It may be, on the other hand, that democratic literature may represent wider sympathies and more genuine enthusiasms. But this opens problems far wider than any mere literary criticism can approach; as, indeed, the scientific critic, if such a person is to come into
