Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds." Let us enforce
this account of the true idealisation by a verse or two of our old
friend Sir John Davies (quoted by Coleridge in his _Biographia
Literaria_). "What an unworldly mass of impressions the mind would be,"
says Sir John in effect, "did not the soul come to the rescue and reduce
these crowding bodies by 'sublimation strange.'"--

_From their gross Matter she abstracts the Forms,
And draws a kind of Quintessence from things,
Which to her proper nature she transforms
To bear them light on her celestial wings.
This doth She when from things particular
She doth abstract the Universal kinds...._

But it is time to descend from these heights (such as they are) of
philosophising, and illustrate the difference between true and false
"idealising" in Poetry by concrete example: and no two better examples
occur to me, for drawing this contrast, than Webster's _Duchess of
Malfy_ and Shakespeare's _Macbeth_. Each of these plays excites horror
and is calculated to excite horror; both have outlived three hundred
years, there or thereabouts; both may be taken as having established an
indefinitely long lease on men's admiration--but to any critical mind,
how different an admiration! Webster is an expert, a _virtuoso_ in
horrifics; in flesh-creeping effects lies his skill; and, indulging that
skill, he not only paints the lily, but repaints it and daubs it yet a
third time. There is no reason on earth--she has offended against no
moral law on earth or in the heavens--that could possibly condemn the
Duchess to the hellish tortures she is made to endure. At the worst she
has married a man beneath her in station. To punish her in Webster's
extravagant fashion every other character, with the whole story of the