we may, indeed choose backwards. We may give our thoughts noble
forefathers. Well begotten, well born our fancies must be; they shall be
also well derived. We have a voice in decreeing our inheritance, and not
our inheritance only, but our heredity. Our minds may trace upwards and
follow their ways to the best well-heads of the arts. The very habit of
our thoughts may be persuaded one way unawares by their antenatal
history. Their companions must be lovely, but need be no lovelier than
their ancestors; and being so fathered and so husbanded, our thoughts may
be intrusted to keep the counsels of literature.

Such is our confidence in a descent we know. But, of a sequel which of
us is sure? Which of us is secured against the dangers of subsequent
depreciation? And, moreover, which of us shall trace the contemporary
tendencies, the one towards honour, the other towards dishonour? Or who
shall discover why derivation becomes degeneration, and where and when
and how the bastardy befalls? The decivilized have every grace as the
antecedent of their vulgarities, every distinction as the precedent of
their mediocrities. No ballad-concert song, feign it sigh, frolic, or
laugh, but has the excuse that the feint was suggested, was made easy, by
some living sweetness once. Nor are the decivilized to blame as having
in their own persons possessed civilization and marred it. They did not
possess it; they were born into some tendency to derogation, into an
inclination for things mentally inexpensive. And the tendency can hardly
do other than continue.

Nothing can look duller than the future of this second-hand and
multiplying world. Men need not be common merely because they are many;
but the infection of commonness once begun in the many, what dullness in
their future! To the eye that has reluctantly discovered this truth--that
the vulgarized are not _un_-civilized, and that there is no growth for