an age when there is so little oratory of literary merit, and so much
popular rant. The subject of sublimity must naturally have attracted a
writer whose own moral nature was pure and lofty, who was inclined to
discover in moral qualities the true foundation of the highest literary
merit. Even in his opening words he strikes the keynote of his own
disposition, where he approves the saying that “the points in which we
resemble the divine nature are benevolence and love of truth.” Earlier
or later born, he must have lived in the midst of literary activity,
curious, eager, occupied with petty questions and petty quarrels,
concerned, as men in the best times are not very greatly concerned, with
questions of technique and detail. Cut off from politics, people found
in composition a field for their activity. We can readily fancy what
literature becomes when not only its born children, but the minor
busybodies whose natural place is politics, excluded from these, pour
into the study of letters. Love of notoriety, vague activity, fantastic
indolence, we may be sure, were working their will in the sacred close
of the Muses. There were literary sets, jealousies, recitations of new
poems; there was a world of amateurs, if there were no papers and
paragraphs. To this world the author speaks like a voice from the older
and graver age of Greece. If he lived late, we can imagine that he did
not quote contemporaries, not because he did not know them, but because
he estimated them correctly. He may have suffered, as we suffer, from
critics who, of all the world’s literature, know only “the last thing
out,” and who take that as a standard for the past, to them unfamiliar,
and for the hidden future. As we are told that excellence is not of the
great past, but of the present, not in the classical masters, but in
modern Muscovites, Portuguese, or American young women, so the author of
the Treatise may have been troubled by Asiatic eloquence, now long
forgotten, by names of which not a shadow survives. He, on the other
hand, has a right to be heard because he has practised a long