than a collection of sweet musical sentences strung
together like beads or even jewels in a necklace. He
will learn that the subject is greater than the manner;
that the first is the one essential without a worthy
choice of which nothing can prosper. Above all, he
will learn that the restless craving after novelty, so
characteristic of all modern writing, the craving after
new plots, new stories, new ideas, is mere disease,
and that the true original genius displays itself not in
the fabrication of what has no existence, but in the
strength and power with which facts of history, or
stories existing so fixedly in the popular belief as to
have acquired so to say the character of facts, shall be
exhibited and delineated.

But while we allow with Mr. Arnold that the theory
will best be learnt from the ancients, we cannot allow,
as he seems to desire us to allow, that the practice of it
was confined to them, or recommend as he does the
disproportionate study, still less the disproportionate
imitation of them. All great artists at all times have followed
the same method, for greatness is impossible without it.
The Italian painters are never weary of the Holy
Family. The matter of Dante's poem lay before him
in the creed of the whole of Europe. Shakespeare has
not invented the substance of any one of his plays.
And the "weighty experience" and "composure of
judgment" with which the study of the ancients no
doubt does furnish "those who habitually practise it,"
may be obtained we believe by the study of the thoughts