1 62 SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 



must be a study from the life, and not from the scholiasts. 

 Theocritus lets us into the secret of his good poetry, when he 

 makes Daphnis tell us that he preferred his rock with a view of 

 the Siculian Sea to the kingdom of Pelops. 



It is one of the marvels of the human mind, this sorcery 

 which the fiend of technical imitation weaves about his victims, 

 giving a phantasmal Helen to their arms, and making an image 

 of the brain seem substance. Men still pain themselves to write 

 Latin verses, matching their wooden bits of phrase together as 

 children do dissected maps, and measuring the value of what 

 they have done, not by any standard of intrinsic merit, but by 

 the difficulty of doing it. Petrarch expected to be known to 

 posterity by his * Africa. Gray hoped to make a Latin poem his 

 monument. Goethe, who was classic in the only way it is now 

 possible to be classic, in his Hermann and Dorothea, and at 

 least Propertian in his Roman Idyls, wasted his time and 

 thwarted his creative energy on the mechanical mock-antique of 

 an unreadable Achilleis. Landor prized his waxen * Gebirus 

 Rex above all the natural fruits of his mind ; and we have no 

 doubt that, if some philosopher should succeed in accomplishing 

 Paracelsus s problem of an artificial homunculus t he would 

 dote on this misbegotten babe of his science, and think him the 

 only genius of the family. We cannot over-estimate the value 

 of some of the ancient classics, but a certain amount of supersti 

 tion about Greek and Latin has come down to us from the 

 revival of learning, and seems to hold in mortmain the intellects 

 of whoever has, at some time, got a smattering of them. Men 

 quote a platitude in either of those tongues with a relish of con 

 viction as droll to the uninitiated as the knighthood of free 

 masonry. Horace Walpole s nephew, the Earl of Orford, when 

 he was in his cups, used to have Statius read aloud to him 

 every night for two hours by a tipsy tradesman, whose hiccup- 

 ings threw in here and there a kind of csesural pause, and found 

 some strange mystery of sweetness in the disquantitied syllables. 

 So powerful is this hallucination that we can conceive of festina 

 lente as the favourite maxim of a Mississippi steamboat captain, 

 and apiaTov fitv vSwp cited as conclusive by a gentleman for whom 

 the bottle before him reversed the wonder of the stereoscope, and 

 substituted the Gascon v for the b in binocular. 



Something of this singular superstition has infected the minds 

 of those who confound the laws of conventional limitation 

 which governed the practice of Greek authors in dramatic com 

 position laws adapted to the habits and traditions and precon- 



