taste, or even profound thought, it yet never reached the goal of
thought, never solved a problem, and, in its highest examples, professed
only to reveal, but not to guide, the reigning manners and customs.
Rarely did its materials pass through the fiery furnace whence art
issues; it was a work of unfaithful intellect, prompted by ideas which
never culminated and were never realized; and it did not rise much above
the "stuffs" of life, as distinguished from the organic creations of the
mind. A many-limbed and shambling creature, which was not made a
spirit by the power of an idea, it fluttered amid all the culture of a
people,--amid the ideas and modes of the state, the church, the family,
the world of society,--like a bungler among paint-pots; but the paints
still remained paints on the canvas, instead of being blended and
transfigured into a thing of beauty. It was the organ of society, but
not of the essential truths which vitalize society, and its incidents
did not rise much above the significance of accidents.

What the novel was in knightly days, that it has continued to be. There
is a mysterious practical potency in precedent. All ideas and institutes
seem to grow in the direction of their first steps, as if from germs.
Thus, the doctrines of the Church fathers are still peculiarly
authoritative in theology, and the immemorial traditions of the common
law are still binding in civil life. Man seems to be an experimental
far more than a freely rational animal; for a fact in the past exerts
a greater influence in determining future action than any new idea. A
revolution must strike deep to eradicate the presumption in favor of
ages. Learned men are now trying to read the hieroglyphics of the East,
the records of an unknown history. Perhaps the result of their labors
will temper the next period in the course of the world more than all our
thinkers. Destiny seems to travel in the harness of precedents.