2 Dr Whewell's Inaugural Lecture. 



honour to express a wish that I should offer to you such 

 reflections as the spectacle of the Great Exhibition has sug- 

 gested to me ; and, in deference to their wishes, and espe- 

 cially as a token of my admiration of the truly royal mind, 

 which saw clearly, in despite of the maxims of antiquity, 

 that there was such a Royal Eoad to knowledge, I shall ven- 

 ture to offer you a few remarks, — which, precisely on account 

 of the circumstances which I have stated, may be considered 

 as representing the views of an unconnected spectator of the 

 great spectacle. 



To write or speak the Epilogue after any great and grand 

 Drama, is by no means an easy task. We see the confession 

 of the difficulty in the very incongruity of the manner in 

 which the task is sometimes attempted : as, when after the 

 curtain has fallen upon a deep and solemn tragedy, some 

 startling attempt at wit and pleasantry is uttered to the 

 audience ; it may be by one of the characters whose deep 

 sorrows or lofty aims we have been following with the pro- 

 foundest interest. You will, at least, on the present occa- 

 sion, not have the difficulty of the task shewn in this manner. 

 Nor, indeed, is it my office, in any sense, to speak an epi- 

 logue at all. Perhaps such remarks as I have to make may 

 rather be likened to the criticism which comes after the 

 drama. For, as you know. Criticism does come after Poetry ; 

 the age of Criticism after the age of Poetry ; Aristotle after 

 Sophocles, Longinus after Homer. And the reason of this 

 has been well pointed out in our time : — that words, that 

 human language, appear in the form in which the poet utters 

 them, and works with them for his purposes, before they 

 appear in the form in which the critic must use them : lan- 

 guage is picturesque and affecting, first ; it is philosophical 

 and critical afterwards : — it is first concrete, then abstract : 

 — it acts first, it analyses afterwards. And this is the case, 

 not with words only, but with works also. The Poet, as the 

 Greeks called him, was the Maker, as our English fathers, 

 also, were wont to call him. And man's power of making 

 may shew itself not only in the beautiful texture of language, 

 the grand machinery of the epic, the sublime display of poeti- 

 cal imagery ; but in those material works which supply the 



