Contents: Literature in the new century.--The supreme leaders.--An apology for technic.--Old friends with new faces.--Invention and imagination.--Poe and the detective-story.--Mark Twain.--A note on Maupassant.--The modern novel and the modern play.--The literary merit of our latter-day drama.--Ibsen the playwright.--The art of the stage-manager.It discusses four legacies from the nineteenth century to the twentieth: --first, the scientific spirit; second, the spread of democracy; third, the assertion of nationality; and, fourth, that stepping across the confines of language and race, for which we have no more accurate name than "cosmopolitanism."