monochord.

The remarkable manifesto just referred to was not long delayed.
Whatever may have been his opinion as to the reception of the two
volumes "by A," he made up his mind, a year after the issue and
withdrawal of the second, to put forth a third, with his name, and
containing, besides a full selection from the other two, fresh
specimens of the greatest importance. In the two former there had been
no avowed "purpose"; here, not merely were the contents sifted on
principle, the important _Empedocles_ as well as some minor
things being omitted: not merely did some of the new numbers,
especially _Sohrab and Rustum_, directly and intentionally
illustrate the: poet's theories, but those theories themselves were
definitely put in a _Preface_, which is the most important
critical document issued in England for something like a generation,
and which, as prefixed by a poet to his poetry, admits no competitors
in English, except some work of Dryden's and some of Wordsworth's.

Beginning with his reasons for discarding _Empedocles_, reasons
which he sums up in a sentence, famous, but too important not to
require citation at least in a note,[5] he passes suddenly to the
reasons which were _not_ his, and of which he makes a good
rhetorical starting-point for his main course. The bad critics of that
day had promulgated the doctrine, which they maintained till a time
within the memory of most men who have reached middle life, though the
error has since in the usual course given way to others--that "the
Poet must leave the exhausted past and draw his subjects from matters
of present import." This was the genuine
"_Times_-_v._-all-the-works-of-Thucydides" fallacy of the
mid-nineteenth century, the fine flower of Cobdenism, the heartfelt