be no validity in a charge which, even when admitted, is followed by no sentence of condemnation. At the very worst, the verdict of the jury is, Damages, one farthing. And a still stronger presumptive argument against it might be based on the ground that, of the three kinds of poesy, or, to speak more generally, of all the arts of representation-imitative, narrative, and lyrical, the present objection is applicable, and is applied, only to the second. Imitative or dramatic art is nothing if not true, since an imitation, ceasing to be true, ceases to imitate; and lyrical art is true in a still higher degree, as being the utterance not simply of sentiments truly belonging to this or to that character, but of the own and very sentiments of the artist himself. So that only against the narrative or historical element of art can the objection be raised. And it is curious to observe that it should be raised not against those arts which employ truth as the means to an end, (the drama aiming at the beautiful, and the lyric aiming at the good), but against that epic art which alone has truth for its ultimate end.

At best, however, it is a mere trick of words. Like the conjuror's bottle that will at pleasure produce wine or water, milk or vinegar; fiction, truth, reality, are words any of which will express ideas the most opposite. Our idea of the Duke of Wellington may be true, that is, correct; but it cannot be true, that is, real hence it is at once true and untrue. There are

ideas, however, which are true neither in the one sense nor in the other, but simply because, like the ciphers of arithmetic or of algebra, they are symbolic of truth. The abstract idea of a triangle, for example, is not a reality, nor is it the mental image of a reality, since all three-sided figures in nature must be scalene, isosceles or equilateral, and the ideal triangle is none of the three. Or, again, the general idea of man answers to no individual in existence; it is neither tall as the Anakim, nor short as the Bosjesmen, nor yet middlesized; neither black nor white; neither old as Parr nor young as the last infant prodigy; it has eyes, but they are not the blue of the Saxon, nor the jet of the Gipsy, nor the hazel of the Celt, nor the pink of the Albino; it is neither bearded like the Arab nor beardless like the Mongol; it applies to all in general, and to none in particular. Those who assert that such abstract ideas have a real and separate existence, are now no more, unless Pierre Leroux be a Realist, as Mr G. H. Lewes declares; and there remain but the Nominalists and the Conceptualists, the former maintaining that what is called, in the abstract, Man, is only a name, the latter, that it is only a notion. In either case, it is a mere fiction of the understanding, but a true fiction, as coins and counters that are nothing in themselves, may yet be of the greatest value. There is like ambiguity in the use of a phrase which we seem to have derived from the Americans. When they speak of

realizing anything, they do not mean making it real, but simply having a lively idea of it, the very antithesis. And it is by taking advantage of these ambiguities that the objection against the truth of poesy is made to wear so imposing an aspect.

But the objection consists not merely in ringing the changes upon words of equivocal meaning, it consists in ignorance of the nature of truth, a blindness that is perhaps due to wilfulness quite as often as to carelessness or to stupidity. The world of sense has no douht a reality of its own, yet what are all its passing scenes when compared with more enduring realities? what are they but a vain show, vanity of vanities, accidents of birth and of fortune, of wind and of rain, of time and of place? They are not substantial; they are only phenomenal. And yet, because the poet treats them as shadows, and refuses to treat them as substances, you say that his work is fiction, with an invidious use of the term. You would first have him secure the shadows of time and place, and then look after the substance from which those shadows fall, whereas he more truthfully seizes the substance, and leaves the shadows to fall where they may. Matters of fact! there is no greater dupe than he who implicitly relies upon matters of fact. The travellers, in Gay's fable of the chameleon, each related a matter of fact, and yet all were wrong. The kernel of the dispute lies in the question, whether the truth of a man is to be found in these

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facts? whether it is to be found in what he does, or in what he is? The poet asserts that a man's actual doings express but partially the truth of his being ; that his actions and the circumstances of his life are but the temporary clothing of certain inner and essential truths; and that to insist upon a strict adherence to such details of costume and external environment is to sacrifice the spirit to the letter.

CHAPTER IV.

GOOD OF POESY.

It is objected that Poesy is not good. And although the objection simply means that the practical influence of the fine arts upon human conduct is to be accounted zero, it is sometimes so worded as to insinuate a suspicion that they may not be favourable to virtue. In admitting the paradox that the artist is no friend to virtue, I must be allowed to extinguish it with another paradox, that he is not therefore a foe to morality.

There is a rule of right, and when human conduct keeps to that rule, let us call it righteousness, or, as in old English, rightwiseness. The rule being ever one and the same, the righteousness must ever be one and the same; but although outwardly one, inwardly it may be more than one. It may arise from different sources in the mind, and these are three. If it proceed from sheer ignorance of evil, it is called innocence; if from a disinclination to evil, it is called holiness; if from the bidding of conscience, it is called