SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 217 



might have been Macchiavelli ; in France, during the 

 seventeenth, Cardinal Richelieu ; in America, during the 

 nineteenth, Abraham Lincoln, but not Ulysses. Truth 

 to nature can be reached ideally, never historically; 

 it must be a study from the life, and not from the scho- 

 liasts. 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 dis- 

 sected maps, and measuring the value of what they have 

 clone, 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 " Her- 

 mann and Dorothea," and at least Propertian in his 

 " Roman Idyls," wasted his time and thwarted his crea- 

 tive energy on the mechanical mock-antique of an un- 

 readable " Achilleis." Landor prized his waxen " Ge- 

 birus 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, 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 superstition 

 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 

 10 



