[13] The classical Landor's impatience of mysticism explains his dislike
of Plato, the mystic among Greeks. Diogenes says to Plato: "I meddle not
at present with infinity or eternity: when I can comprehend them, I will
talk about them," "Imaginary Conversations," 2d series, Conversation XV.
Landor's contempt for German literature is significant.

[14] "Selections from Newman," Introduction, pp. xlvii-xlviii.

[15] Racine observes that good sense and reason are the same in all ages.
What is the result of this generalization? Heroes can be transported
from epoch to epoch, from country to country, without causing surprise.
Their Achilles is no more a Greek than is Porus an Indian; Andromache
feels and talks like a seventeenth-century princess: Phaedra experiences
the remorse of a Christian.--_Pellissier, "Literary Movement in France,"_
p. 18.

In substituting men of concrete, individual lives for the ideal figures
of tragic art, romanticism was forced to determine their physiognomy by a
host of local, casual details. In the name of universal truth the
classicists rejected the coloring of time and place; and this is
precisely what the romanticists seek under the name of particular
reality.--_Ibid._ p. 220. Similarly Montezuma's Mexicans in Dryden's
"Indian Emperor" have no more national individuality than the Spanish
Moors in his "Conquest of Granada." The only attempt at local color in
"Aurungzebe"--an heroic play founded on the history of a contemporary
East Indian potentate who died seven years after the author--is the
introduction of the _suttee_, and one or two mentions of elephants.

[16] See "Les Orientales" (Hugo) and Nerval's "Les Nuits de Rhamadan" and