own. The owners of what Gray "conveyed" would have found it hard to identify their property and prove title to it after it had once suffered the Graychange by steeping in his mind and memory.

When the example in our Latin Grammar tells us that Mors communis est omnibus, it states a truism of considerable interest, indeed, to the person in whose particular case it is to be illustrated, but neither new nor startling. No one would think of citing it, whether to produce conviction or to heighten discourse. Yet mankind are agreed in finding something more poignant in the same reflection when Horace tells us that the palace as well as the hovel shudders at the indiscriminating foot of Death. Here is something more than the dry statement of a truism. The difference between the two is that between a lower and a higher; it is, in short, the difference between prose and poetry. The oyster has begun, at least, to secrete its pearl, something identical with its shell in substance, but in sentiment and association how unlike! Malherbe takes the same image and makes it a little more picturesque, though, at the same time, I fear, a little more Parisian, too, when he says that the sentinel pacing before the gate of the Louvre cannot forbid Death an entrance to the King. And how long had not that comparison between the rose's life and that of the maiden dying untimely been a commonplace when the same Malherbe made it irreclaimably his own by mere felicity of phrase? We do not asl: where people got their hints, but what they mad

out of them. The commonplace is unhappily within reach of us all, and unhappily, too, they are rare who can give it novelty and even invest it with a kind of grandeur as Gray knew how to do. If his poetry be a mosaic, the design is always his own. He, if any, had certainly "the last and greatest art," -the art to please. Shall we deny ourselves to the charm of sentiment because we prefer the electric shudder that imagination gives us? Even were Gray's claims to being a great poet rejected, he can never be classed with the many, so great and uniform are the efficacy of his phrase and the music to which he sets it. This unique distinction, at least, may be claimed for him without dispute, that he is the one English poet who has written less and pleased more than any other. Above all, it is as a teacher of the art of writing that he is to be valued. If there be any well of English undefiled, it is to be found in him and his master, Dryden. They are still standards of what may be called classical English, neither archaic nor modern, and as far removed. from pedantry as from vulgarity. They were

"Tous deux disciples d'une escole

Où l'on forcene doucement,"

a school in which have been enrolled the Great Masters of literature.

JOHN RUSKIN.

1819

[Ruskin's literary criticism is to be found scattered all through his writings, sometimes in the most unexpected connections. On specific passages he is frequently unre liable, inasmuch as he is at times carried away by his sensibility, or by that capricious quality of his genius that renders him on almost all subjects a partially unbalanced writer. Nothing, for instance, could be much more uncritical than the extent to which he pushes his interpretation of the lines in Lycidas, on which he comments in a well-known passage of Sesame and Lilies. In reading him it is necessary to decline to assume the attitude that he somewhere recommends readers to take—that of the docile and acquiescent pupil. But in spite of his being occasionally fanciful and erratic, his unusual poetic feeling, his deep sympathies, and the force and beauty of his expression give to many of his literary excursions great interest and value. Nor is he without a high order of intellectual insight, as is shown in the following discussion of what he calls the Pathetic Fallacy; though even here, at one point, he gives a singular illustration of the fault he is condemning. The selection is from the third volume of Modern Painters. In the preceding paragraphs he has been objecting, in his usual attitude towards metaphysics, to the use of the words "objective" and "subjective" in criticism.]

From Modern Painters, Vol. III, Chapter XII.

Now, therefore, putting these tiresome and absurd words quite out of our way, we may go on at our

ease to examine the point in question, namely, the difference between the ordinary, proper, and true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy;' false appearances, I say, as being entirely unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only imputed to it by us.

For instance

"The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould
Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold."

This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads that it is anything else than a plain crocus?

It is an important question. For, throughout our past reasonings about art, we have always found that nothing could be good or useful, or ultimately pleasurable, which was untrue. But here is something pleasurable in written poetry which is nevertheless untrue. And what is more, if we think over our favorite poetry, we shall find it full of this kind of fallacy, and that we like it all the more for being

So.

It will appear also, on consideration of the matter, that this fallacy is of two principal kinds.

Either,

["The contemplative fancy summons images of external relationship."]

2 Holmes.

as in this case of the crocus, it is the fallacy of wilful fancy, which involves no real expectation that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational. Of the cheating of the fancy we shall have to speak presently; but, in this chapter, I want to examine the nature of the other error, that which the mind admits, when affected strongly by emotion. Thus, for instance, in Alton Locke,They rowed her in across the rolling foamThe cruel, crawling foam."

The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the "Pathetic fallacy."

Now we are in the habit of considering this fallacy as eminently a character of poetical description, and the temper of mind in which we allow it, as one eminently poetical, because passionate. But I believe, if we look well into the matter, that we shall find the greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness, that it is only the second order of poets who much delight in it.'

I admit two orders of poets, but no third and by these two orders I mean the Creative (Shakespeare, Homer, Dante), and Reflective or Perceptive (Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson). But both of these must be first-rate in their range, though their range is different; and with poetry second-rate in quality no one ought