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AMONG the distinctive features of our democratic days not the least striking is the widespread craving for superficial learning which has produced, and is still producing, such curious educational results. Never before has there been a generation at once so feverishly eager for knowledge and so desperately impatient of study; so intelligently interested in pursuing so vast a variety of subjects through the pages of a magazine article or a course of ten lectures, and no farther. The demand has naturally created the supply; and the condensed foods for which there is now so large a sale, the innumerable extracts and essences whose merits are gauged by the low price at which they may be obtained and the celerity with which they may be swallowed, find their parallel in the numerous popular devices for satisfying the hunger of the mind as cheaply and easily as possible. There are still those who hold that he who begins the Quest of Learning by such anxious insistence upon a short and comfortable route has altogether misconceived its nature and its aim; that no knowledge worthy the name was ever yet come by in such a temper as this. But they are in a minority; and whether they be right or wrong is not now the question. The matter is only referred to here because it is this significant union of indolence and curiNo. 432.-vol. LXXII.

osity that accounts, in great measure, for the remarkable increase in the number of translations which find their way to the shelves of our circulating libraries. We are keen to know something of foreign literatures; we have no time to spend in learning foreign languages; there is only one way out of the difficulty.

This attempt to roll from our island the reproach of being insular would be a fairer subject for congratulation than it is, were it not for the opinion prevalent among us that translation is easy work, requiring no particular literary ability, or indeed particular ability of any kind. The translator is reported to be badly paid by the publisher, and this, to the general reader, naturally suggests inferiority in the nature of his wares. He is generally ranked among the unskilled workmen who hang about the market-place of literature and are glad of odd jobs.

If this low estimate of the translator's services were confined to the general reader it would matter comparatively little; but it is unfortunately too often shared by the translator himself. There are, of course, conspicuous exceptions; but for the most part the industrious writers who "do into English" much of the continental fiction read in this country, would themselves readily disclaim any

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