you as overpoweringly interesting, nor the fashions of twenty years ago as overwhelmingly funny. You are interested now rather in those permanent human passions and virtues and powers, in that play of wit and imagination, in that instinct of craftsmanship, in that study of perfection, in all those fluid elements of the intellectual and artistic life which are present in every great age, and which make the artists and scholars of all ages, in the higher sense, contemporary. You can appreciate the talent of Charlie Chaplin, and yet remember without humiliation your admiration for Coquelin and Edwin Booth. Your relish for the work of contemporary playwrights does not, to you, seem to require the "scrapping" even of so old a workman as Molière. You have given many younger men their "start," and have been the first to salute their maiden efforts; and yet you have not denounced your own masters, Arnold and Lowell, nor renounced your own coevals. You have dared to honor the memory of many men, friends of yours, who were born in your own time or a few years earlier or later—Aldrich, Bunner, Lounsbury, Stevenson, Austin Dobson. Andrew Lang, Howells, Stedman, McDowell, Mark Twain, Saint-Gaudens, and innumerable others.
With that eagerness to understand the world you are living in, which has always characterized you, you lean from your window to catch the hostile shouting of the Mohawks in the street, so that you may learn the head and front of your offending.
