was still some good and virtue and opportunity left in the world.

The people who feel their own age prosaic are those who see only its
costume. And that is what makes it prosaic--that we have not faith
enough in ourselves to think our own clothes good enough to be presented
to posterity in. The artists fancy that the court dress of posterity is
that of Van Dyck's time, or Caesar's. I have seen the model of a statue
of Sir Robert Peel,--a statesman whose merit consisted in yielding
gracefully to the present,--in which the sculptor had done his best to
travesty the real man into a make-believe Roman. At the period when
England produced its greatest poets, we find exactly the reverse of
this, and we are thankful that the man who made the monument of Lord
Bacon had genius to copy every button of his dress, everything down to
the rosettes on his shoes, and then to write under his statue, "Thus sat
Francis Bacon"--not "Cneius Pompeius"--"Viscount Verulam." Those men had
faith even in their own shoe-strings.

After all, how is our poor scapegoat of a nineteenth century to blame?
Why, for not being the seventeenth, to be sure! It is always raining
opportunity, but it seems it was only the men two hundred years ago who
were intelligent enough not to hold their cups bottom-up. We are like
beggars who think if a piece of gold drop into their palm it must be
counterfeit, and would rather change it for the smooth-worn piece of
familiar copper. And so, as we stand in our mendicancy by the wayside,
Time tosses carefully the great golden to-day into our hats, and we turn
it over grumblingly and suspiciously, and are pleasantly surprised at
finding that we can exchange it for beef and potatoes. Till Dante's time
the Italian poets thought no language good enough to put their nothings
into but Latin,--and indeed a dead tongue was the best for dead
thoughts,--but Dante found the common speech of Florence, in which men