Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/247

 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.