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their enthusiasm the feel of the past and set the world its former rousing pace. But England, wanting peace, repulses them. They flee for romance to the secret corners of themselves; they try to kindle the fire again from a few poor sparks; but fate will not be coerced. Shelley drowns in the Tyrrhene Sea; Lord Byron is consumed by a fever at Missolonghi: the age has no use for adventures. The world is ashen grey. England is feeding comfortably on her bleeding prey. The bourgeois, the shopkeeper, and the clerk are king; they loll about on the throne as though it were a couch. England is digesting. Art, to please it, has to be easily assimilated; it must not disturb, it must not disrupt with wild emotions, but must gently cajole and caress. It might only be sentimental, but not tragic. They did not want the shudder which darts through the breast like a flash of lightning, which takes the breath away or makes the blood go cold. All this could be supplied only too well from real life, in the news coming out of France and Russia. Simply a slight titillation was welcome, the trifling nonsense of following stories through varying complications of plot. The people of that time wanted an art for the home and family, books to be read by the fire in comfort while the storm rattled at the door. And similarly, these books should snap and crack with numerous harmless little flames. This art should not produce passion and intoxication, but should warm the heart like tea. The victors of yesterday no longer cared to venture new conquests, but desired at most to retain what they had already acquired. They had become so uneasy that they distrusted any strong feelings within themselves. In books, as in life, they wanted only moderate passions. They wanted no bursts of ecstasy, no feelings which are not normal or perfectly presentable. In England of that time happiness was identical with rumination, aesthetics with morals; the use of the senses was lost in prudery, loyalty in chauvinism, love in marriage. England was content with things as they are. Consequently, if art was to gain recognition of so sated a nation it must on its own score manifest a certain contentment, praising the powers that be and asking for nothing beyond them. And this desire for a comfortable, friendly, digestive art finds its appropriate genius, just as Elizabethan England found its Shakespeare. Dickens is the extrinsication of contemporary England's artistic requirements. He became famous because he had appeared at the proper moment; it is his tragedy that he was overwhelmed by his country's requirements. His art is nurtured on the