familiar instances from the Latin Epic, understanding the word in Aristotle's enlarged sense. Read the story of the fall of Troy, or of the deaths of Turnus and Camilla, for pity and for fear. Read the burst of feeling in the second Georgic for the passion of pride of country. Or

43

take those single lines, which have a

power beyond their mere words to represent a whole mood of feeling; the passion of pity in

Sunt

lacrimæ

tangunt;

44

rerum, et mentem mortalia

the passion of despair in

Arma amens capio, nec sat rationis in armis;

45

the passion of panic and indignation which breathes beneath the "drums and tramplings" heard in

Ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis ; 46 the passion of the strength which stands unaided

Inconcussa tenens dubio vestigia mundo; 47

the passion of a great and generous failure

Quem si non tenuit, magnis tamen excidit ausis. 48

Every mood of passion, and not the sterner ones only, do the poets call up and, in Aristotle's sense, imitate; and where this imitation fails, however wise the thought or eloquent its expression, I think we shall find that we withhold or grudge the name of poetry. Many lines and passages there will be, perhaps even in the great poems, which will not bear the

test.

Aristotle allows for dull reaches of C. 24. Epic verse, where elaborate diction may properly make up for the absence of other charm. But on the whole view, and in his general work, the poet will be found to imitate feeling: he holds up the mirror to Nature, but it is a magic mirror, one which reflects the deep springs of action as well as the action lying before our eyes; not only the world of phenomena

(if we may turn Plato's words against himself), but the phenomena as they appear to the eye of genius; that is, the realities which genius apprehends and can alone interpret.

I cannot hope that I have made Aristotle's conception of Poetry stand out clearly and completely, for the subject is difficult and our review must be summary. But I have endeavoured to touch upon most of the salient points; and to show where his guiding hand has helped those who have come after him. I have freely used the words of modern writers, not for the sake of ornament only, but that we might feel how modern, rather how true for all time, much of our author's thought remains. And as I began by stating reasons which made it likely beforehand that the book would concern us all, as being the first effort of criticism, as coming from a mind so comprehensive and so

acute, as based upon the brilliant poetical literature of Greece, so I will now appeal to authority, and ask you to hear Milton's estimate of the place and value of a study of the Poetics. You will find it in his

treatise On Education

"When all these employments are well conquered, then will the choice Histories, Heroic Poems, and Attic Tragedies of stateliest and most regal argument, with all the famous Political Orations, offer themselves; which, if they were not only read, but some of them got by memory and solemnly pronounced with right accent and grace, as might be taught, would endue them with the spirit of Demosthenes or Cicero, Euripides or Sophocles. now, lastly, will be the time to read with them those organic arts which enable them to discourse and write perspicuously and elegantly, and according to the fittest style of lofty, mean, or lowly. Logic therefore, so much as is useful, is to be repressed

And

to this due place, with all her well-coucht Heads or Topics, until it be time to open her contracted palm into a graceful and ornate rhetoric taught out of the rule of Plato, Aristotle, Phalereus, Cicero, Hermogenes, Longinus. To which Poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less subtle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate. I mean not here the prosody of a verse, which they could not but have hit on before among the rudiments of grammar, but that sublime Art which in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true Epic Poem, what of a Dramatic, what of a Lyric, what Decorum is, which is the grand masterpiece to observe.

"This would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common Rimers and Play-writers be, and show