The Librarian's Dream. 235 for subterranean trains. Then the tearing seventies, when the Great Civilisation went definitely mad the first gnashings of anarchy out of the ruins of magnificent Paris ; the heart of London dug out for railway termini ; third-class express trains and third-class ballot in one year ; snobs masquerading as patricians ; the United States drunk with victory and green- backs ; the august science of comparative theology wrested by prigs from the hands of scholars, to level the monarch religion beside folk-lore. Then the raging eighties, with their electric lights, telephones and type-writers, their mannish women and feverish men ; explosions of dynamite and shadows of coming anarchy ; Europe an armed camp ; literature swamped in news- papers. Then the insane nineties electric cars tearing through the streets of giant cities, maiming and killing the citizens ; the armed peace big with the great tribulation, a deadly hush before the hurricane ; a toy metropolis built of plaster for a summer show, crammed with the wealth of nations, and then demolished; the lights of learning clouded with whole trade- winds of literary dust ; the divine classics of the planet spit upon by novel-readers and ignorant ghost-hunters ; the Deity dethroned until at last I saw where the mad nineteenth century leapt alive into the maelstrom-cyclone of the twentieth. But the prodigious researches of its scholars had been refined in the crucible of time, and had come forth as gold. Even the snobs, vixens, ghost-hunters, demagogues and dyna- mitards were useful "To point a moral or adorn a tale." And I awoke. ALBERT J. EDMUNDS. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, March, 1894.
