118 CARLYLE. 



side of Virgil 1 " cries poor old Cavalcanti at his wits' 

 end. Certainly not altogether that. There must he 

 also the great Mantuan's art ; his power, not only of 

 being strong in parts, but of making those parts cohe 

 rent in an harmonious whole, and tributary to it. Gray, 

 if we may believe the commentators, has not an idea, 

 scarcely an epithet, that he can call his own ; and yet 

 he is, in the best sense, one of the classics of English 

 literature. He had exquisite felicity of choice ; his 

 dictionary had no vulgar word in it, no harsh one, but 

 all culled from the luckiest moods of poets, and with a 

 faint but delicious aroma of association ; he had a per 

 fect sense of sound, and one idea without which all the 

 poetic outfit (si absit prudentia) is of little avail, that 

 of combination and arrangement, in short, of art. The 

 poets from whom he helped himself have no more claim 

 to any of his poems as wholes, than the various beauties 

 of Greece (if the old story were true) to the Venus of 

 the artist. 



Imagination, as we have said, has more virtue to keep 

 a book alive than any other single faculty. Burke is 

 rescued from the usual doom of orators, because his 

 learning, his experience, his sagacity are rimmed with a 

 halo by this bewitching light behind the intellectual eye 

 from the highest heaven of the brain. Shakespeare has 

 impregnated his common sense with the steady glow of 

 it, and answers the mood of youth and age, of high aad 

 low, immortal as that dateless substance of the soul he 

 wrought in. To have any chance of lasting, a book 

 must satisfy, not merely some fleeting fancy of the day, 

 but a constant longing and hunger of human nature ; 

 and it needs only a superficial study of literature to be 

 convinced that real fame depends rather on the sum of 

 an author's powers than on any brilliancy of special 

 parts. There must be wisdom as well as wit, sense n 



