A Collecting Age

Extract

While it may be doubted whether a great general who was also a great author gave expression to the precise sentiments which Mr. Shaw chooses to place in his mouth, yet it is nevertheless true that men of action, intent on the things of the present, are as a rule negligent, if not scornful, of the things of the past. A case could perhaps be made out for the thesis that just as old men live on memories so it is only when the spring-time of the race is over that much interest is manifested in what has gone by. Be this as it may, our own age differs markedly from others, even from a period so near to us as the eighteenth century, in the zeal with which it seeks to collect and preserve its ancestral heirlooms. Our forbears were apt to regard times antecedent to their own as rude and contemptible; they had escaped from a wilderness and were not anxious to be reminded of it.