Literature. But the term of his ostracism will expire, and the
sooner the better; not for him, but for those who banished him, and
for the coming generation, who

"Will blush to find their fathers were his foes."

[Footnote 3: As far as regards the poets of ancient times, this
assertion is, perhaps, right; though, if there be any truth in what
Ælian and Seneca have left on record, of the obscurity, during their
lifetime, of such men as Socrates and Epicurus, it would seem to prove
that, among the ancients, contemporary fame was a far more rare reward
of literary or philosophical eminence than among us moderns. When the
"Clouds" of Aristophanes was exhibited before the assembled deputies of
the towns of Attica, these personages, as Ælian tells us, were
unanimously of opinion, that the character of an unknown person, called
Socrates, was uninteresting upon the stage; and Seneca has given the
substance of an authentic letter of Epicurus, in which that philosopher
declares that nothing hurt him so much, in the midst of all his
happiness, as to think that Greece,--"illa nobilis Græcia,"--so far
from knowing him, had scarcely even heard of his existence.--Epist. 79.]

[Footnote 4: I certainly ventured to differ from the judgment of my
noble friend, no less in his attempts to depreciate that peculiar walk
of the art in which he himself so grandly trod, than in the
inconsistency of which I thought him guilty, in condemning all those who
stood up for particular "schools" of poetry, and yet, at the same time,
maintaining so exclusive a theory of the art himself. How little,
however, he attended to either the grounds or degrees of my dissent from
him, will appear by the following wholesale report of my opinion, in his
"Detached Thoughts:"