text:  As regards the state of literature take out your pencils (you all carry pencils to calculate either the long odds or the odds on 'Change ) and make out a list of the works published during the last five years likely to be known _even by name_ a hundred years hence! It is some comfort to feel that _by sight_ they cannot be known--that few of them will survive to disgrace us--that the circulating libraries possess the one merit of wear and tear for the destruction of their filthy generation like Saturn of old; for it would grieve us to think of even the trunks of the two thousandth century being lined with what lines the brains of our contemporaries