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At the present day, though the use of a common literary tongue has ceased among us, the interchange of thought with its resulting unity is yet more complete. The printing-press, the electric-telegraph which gives to language an almost omnipresent voice, and above all, the habit of translating from one language into another whatever may be of general interest, are more completely binding all nations throughout the world where a literary speech prevails, into one body; until, at the present day, civilized men in the most distant corners of the earth are in some ways more closely united intellectually than were the inhabitants of neighbouring villages in the middle ages, or than savages divided by half a mile of forest are at the present day. The chemical discovery made to-day by a man of science in his laboratory and recorded in the pages of the scientific journal, is modifying the work in a thousand other laboratories throughout Europe before the end of the week. The picture or ideal of life, painted by the poet or writer of fiction, once clad in print travels round the globe, modifying the actions of men and women before the ink with which it was first written has well dried out; and the news that two workmen were shot at a strike in Hungary, committed to the telegraph wire, will, before night—and quicker than the feet of an old crone could have carried news from house to house in a village—have crossed from Europe to America and Australia, and before to-morrow half a million working men and women, separated from each other by oceans, will have cursed between their teeth. Probably to no man is the part played by literature in creating this unity in the civilized world so clear as to the writer himself, with whom it is often a matter not of intellectual interference, but of ocular demonstration. What he has evolved in a sleepless night in London or Paris, or as he paced in the starlight under the Southern Cross, if he commit it to writing and confide it to the pages of some English review will, within two months, have passed from end to end of the globe: the Europeanized Japanese will be reading it in his garden at Tokio; the colonist will have received it with his weekly mail; it will be on the library tables of England and America. Even if his thought be thrown into the more permanent form of the separate volume, it may be months or years, but if it be of value in itself, it will as surely go round the globe on the current of the European speech. The Australian will be found reading it at the door of his house on the solitary sheep-run; the London city clerk, as he rides through the fog in the omnibus, will take it from his pocket; the Scotch workman will spend his half-holiday over it; the duchess will have fingered it in her boudoir; the American girl may have wept over it, and the educated Hindu have studied it. A little later on if it have value, it will, through translation, pass the limits of national speech. The German student will be carrying it in his breast-pocket as he walks along the Rhine; and the French critic will be examining it with a view to to-morrow's article; the Russian will be perusing it in its French dress; and even the polygamous Turk, in his palace on the Bosphorus, will be scanning its pages between sips of coffee. Within a few years the writer may see on his table at the same moment a pile of letters from every corner of the globe, and from men of almost every race that commands a literature. The thoughts which have visited him in his solitary night will have brought him into communion, closer than any of physical contact, with men and women in every corner of the globe; and as he handles the little pile—dating from a British Residency at Pequ, a cattle-ranch in California, an unknown village in Russia—he realizes perhaps with surprise, that even his own slight thread of thought forms one of those long cords which, passing from land to land and from man to man, are slowly but surely weaving humanity into one. Perhaps to the modern writer alone is that "human solidarity," transcending all bounds of nation and race, for which the French soldier on the barricades of Paris declared it was necessary for him to die, not merely an idea, but a solid and practical reality. His kindred are not only those dwelling in the same house with him, but that band of men and women all the world over of whatever race or colour in whom his thought is germinating; for him almost alone at the present day is the circle of nationality, which for the ordinary man still shuts in so large a part of his interest and sympathies, obliterated by a still wider, which knows no distinction of speech, race, or colour—his readers are his people, and all literary peoples his fellow-countrymen.