be secured, who ought to try to get it, and what, in general, its claims to consideration were in the fierce rivalry of things important for the world's attention. Apparently we no longer talk very much or very seriously about culture now. Doubtless Chautauqua lecturers, or some of them, still consider it a good thing for everybody to get a bit of at odd moments. The word culture is still used, also, around colleges and universities as a kind of vague shibboleth in that noisy but not very dreadful warfare which at such institutions is at all times waging between the advocates of the sciences and the advocates of the humanities. But our wise men talk rather less about culture now than wise men used to. The officially great of the earth, and the ex-officially great, never think, now, of the necessity of putting in an occasional word for culture as they go up and down the land, sermonizing upon the importance of honesty, energy, courage, and other old, respectable, and well-understood virtues. And for the magazine writers of to-day, the very last thing in the world that they would think of writing about is culture. Possibly there are a few popular lecturers still alive who have a discourse upon this subject in their list. But we know very well what most of us would do if such a lecturer came to town, preceded by the announcement that his theme was to be culture: we should stay at home, unless he were a very famous man indeed, and we felt reasonably confident that before he got very far in his lecture he would wander a long way from his topic, and never return to it; just as we should do if it were announced that the lecturer's topic would be Life, or Honesty, or Goodness, or any other subject at once vague and worn.
It is certainly true that culture, the word and the thing, was once a good deal talked about and written about, was a wellworn theme when our generation dropped it, or all but dropped it, turning it over, as it did, to those guileless classes to which allusion has been made: Chautauqua and other popular lecturers, and college teachers; classes notoriously deficient in the ability to discriminate between living ideas and dead ones-if one may say that without disrespect to the political gentlemen who more and more abound on the Chautauqua platform, and who do not, of course, fall under this condemnation. Doubtless the world