—IV
The Hon. HAROLD NICOLSON , C.M.G. : ' Changes in Taste'
HAVING described last week how the reading public has changed in the last two hundred years, Mr. Nicolsongoesonthiseveningtoexamine the way in which literary taste has altered. In the eighteenth century the taste was that of the landed gentry, in the nineteenth that of the rapidly developing ' middle class.' A reaction has set in against romanticism : nobody nowadays wishes to read—except for pure recreation -about the improbable or the impossible. The words ' classic ' and ' romantic ' have, indeed, taken on a new sense, which Mr. Nicolson will try to define.