to say that this is the actual method according to which illustrious men are compounded and turned out of the laboratory of Nature. What I do mean is, I trust, sufficiently obvious, the rather that it has often enough been insisted on before-I mean that they belong to their time and are but specimens selected out of a multitude which clusters around them. A thousand influences cooperate with, a thousand accidents combine to impress each original mind, and nearly the same influences cooperate with, and nearly the same accidents combine to impress myriads of other minds and other temperaments, separated from the nobler ones by narrower or broader lines of demarcation. I hope I may say it without irreverence, they that run in the race run all, but one only receiveth the prize.' Mr. Ruskin would forbid the race. Is he sure that, having done so, he could always secure the prize for the most deserving? The very great are apt sometimes in youth to outgrow their strength, to exhibit more of struggle and contortion and awkwardness than some symmetrical rival, who is a better master of his genius, because his genius was never born to rise so high, and therefore never strives and ferments with such irregular and intermitting power. All this, however, has been brought home to the feelings and common

sense of mankind by the world-famous story of the Ugly Duck, so that I need not enlarge upon the subject. I will content myself with reminding Mr. Ruskin, that even if he could succeed in establishing his prohibitory decrees, and in beating down free-trade so far as poetry is concerned, he might still find himself self-baffled in the end, by the defeat of his own object, and the suppression of his own swan.

The second proposition to which Mr. Ruskin demands our assent is this: that as there is more firstrate poetry than can be read or enjoyed in the length of a single life, the attention of the world ought to be concentrated upon that, and the lyres of all meaner minstrels impounded at once, as you take away a gun from a poacher. Whether this be quite the case, unless he include in his corpus poetarum that huge Calmuck Epic, of which every polite person among the Calmucks is expected to know by heart forty-eight books, at least, out of the three or four hundred which lie open to his memory, I do not think it necessary to inquire, because it is wholly irrelevant to the matter in hand. He himself has told us, elsewhere, with his usual eloquence, that the artist (and it really matters not a jot whether such artist be poet, painter, sculptor, or musician) becomes great, and earns his

glory, by being the man of men, the contemporary among contemporaries in his own day. He embodies their aspirations, he interprets their vague yearnings, he soothes their sorrows, he gives a voice to the dumb struggle of their passions, he lives, as they do, in the life of the present, instead of striving to create a future as yet unfelt by them, or to reawaken a past which they have forgotten. Now the complicated influences, which act upon our own time, may be less noble and less fruitful than those which acted upon the fellow-citizens of Dante or of Shakespeare, but still they have a nobility which belongs to themselves, and are entitled to bear their own natural fruit. This again brings us back to what I said before, that we must get our poets as we can, according to the methods which nature is determined to employ.

There is a dismal theory of the universe, that all the uncountable suns throughout space are smouldering down, gradually, but surely, into one perpetual night. More cheerful astronomers, however, are to be found, who encourage a hope that this is not altogether so; that what seems to us a void, is filled everywhere with dormant seeds of being-with, as it were, a diffused and impalpable vapour of heat and light and energy. So that everywhere, the great

stars perish not, but are endowed with mysterious powers for drawing forth, and condensing, and assimilating to their own essence, the spirit of universal life which lies floating around them wherever they go; and for repairing, in this manner, the overflowings of incessant waste, from fountains of everlasting renovation. To this movement (if there be such a movement) of the heavens through space, we can perhaps liken the progress of Poetry through Time. At one season it may rejoice as a giant to run its course, in harmony with noble materials of inspiration, and with the heart of some great age; at another, it may have to toil across poorer and thinner regions of thought. But always, whether the element in which it moves be rich or poor, it is driven, by the law of its existence, to get as much life as it can for itself out of the surrounding atmosphere, or else to starve and die.

It is therefore idle to talk of the great writers of old, as being enough for the world, and that without any addition to their numbers. Men of mature age may return to them with delight, and interest themselves by observing how and where the poets who enchanted their boyhood approach to, and how and where they fall short of these, the acknowledged masters of their

common art. But there is a yearning instinct in the youth of each generation, the mother, I believe, of all true poetry, which seeks ever to find in the songs which it loves and dwells upon, the reflection of its own passions and the echo of its own thoughts. In proportion as those passions are worth reflecting, and those thoughts are worth echoing, in that proportion, I apprehend, does the poetry of any particular time or country establish itself among the lasting possessions of mankind; but whether it be ephemeral or whether it be immortal, have it you must.

We now come to the remarkable dictum that unless the poetry of any poet be all good, it is none of it good. Surely this is a hard saying, and the lantern of Diogenes must be put into requisition, if we hope to find a writer of verses who is fit to live. Is all Shakespeare good? is all Homer good? is all Dante good? He must be an unflinching partizan who could answer these questions in the affirmative. Even, however, if we put aside such Di Majores, as soaring, in a region of their own, beyond the reach of criticism, I, for one, am not prepared to give up Lochiel and the Battle of the Baltic, the Last Man, and O'Connor's Child, and the Mariners of England, and some twenty other of Campbell's odes, because he wrote much