the expression to mean that we should "show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image;" that is, that we should create forms and images in which such ideas shall be recognized-not merely that we should copy material forms of things. Another expression of Shakespeare's, though it specially applies to the "art" of propagating varieties of plants, may be taken in a more general sense.

"Yet nature is made better by no mean,

But nature makes that mean: so o'er that art,
Which you say adds to nature, is an art

That nature makes."

By this he wishes us to infer, as it seems to me, that the product of the artist's mind is a real growth, no less real than are the products of the laws of natureno less real than the "streaked gillyvors ;" and is, in this sense, "made by nature." It is an existence in the great order of things. But it by no means follows that it is therefore subject to what we loosely call natural laws, as we shall see a little later.

We may dismiss this question of imitation by the remark of Goethe, who says truly that, “Art is called art, just because it is not nature."

Let us now look to "pleasure." Mankind may roughly be divided into two great classes, to which every one, consciously or unconsciously, belongs— those who look on pleasure or happiness (or whatever other more etherialized name you like to give it) as an end in itself, and those who do not. It may

be that we are predestined to such a notion—that it is innate in us, but, however this may be, the principle involved is that which lies at the root of all our character and our views of life. It would be utterly idle and presumptuous of me to attempt to treat this question with a hope of convincing those who differ from me; for to convince them would mean to change entirely their mode of looking at things-to change their inborn character by a syllogism. But as regards art, if we once allow that its function is imitation, we must also allow that its end is mere pleasure. We therefore naturally find philosophers, such as Aristotle, who define poetry as "truthful imitation," and even Bacon, who allows that art aims at a "more ample greatness" than can be seen in nature, and gives poetry the name of “imaginative fiction," and the "theatre of the mind," and all those who seek for a true end in material objects—all utilitarians, hedonists, and the like, as well as the followers of the modern sickly æstheticism—and, besides these, others who profess lofty religious ideals, but who draw a charmed circle, outside of which they will recognize no revelation,-all these, we find, tell us that the end of art is to give pleasure—innocent, healthy, bracing pleasure perhaps, but nothing higher than pleasure.

"I would define," says the American poet, Poe, "the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the intellect

or with the conscience it has only collateral relations. Unless accidentally, it has no concern with Duty or Truth."

Now I would dare to affirm, in opposition to this, that poetry is the creation of a reality, real by virtue of the ideal truth that it represents; and that its sole arbiter is not taste, but our sense of ideal truth or perfection, to whose verdict we shall find that both taste and understanding must bow.

But are we not to love a thing simply for its beauty? Must we always be extracting a moral from such things? Emphatically-no. Indeed, to

endeavour to formulate and define to ourselves in words or thought the idea brought to us is merely to transfer it to another form, whereas we ought to accept it in the form in which it comes, whether as a thing of beauty appealing to us through our senses, or otherwise.

I must, however, state more fully what I mean by that beauty of which Taste is the sole arbiter.

The qualities in things that attract or repel us— beauty and unloveliness, whether they consist in certain combinations of sensible things, or of a "proportion" of which these things are the expressed numbers, whatever these qualities are, they act on us through a sense just in the same way as colour, or size, is brought to us by the senses. We can 'classify things as beautiful or repulsive by what we call our sense of beauty in the same way as we classify things

as red or green by our sense of colour. And the mere mention of such things as a Hottentot Venus, an African lip-ring, Arabian music, even the different styles of admired personal beauty and dress in more civilized countries, or the infatuation of a lover, or a parent, all these will show that there may be beauty blindness as well as colour-blindness; that, in fact, such beauty is only subjective.

This beauty is only one of the accidents, as they are called, of material existence, just as greenness, redness, heaviness, and the like; and the fact that it excites our emotions and attracts us is to be classed with other natural facts, such as those consequent on the law of gravity, or of capillary attraction.

Taste, if I am not mistaken, is not to be the sole arbiter, but our higher Reason, which discerns the ideal truth of a representation, and in whose verdict the taste and understanding must acquiesce.

Let us see whether this is a mere groundless theory, or whether we can prove it by an example. The poet Horace, while he allows that "painters and poets always have the liberty of making whatever audacious creations they please," limits his permission thus: 'But you must not place a woman's head on a horse's neck, clothe the body in feathers, and make it end in a fish's tail." Now, to omit at present the question of painting, such a combination as this has actually been made by Dante in his monster Geryon, "a beast with a pointed tail, with serpent's body, and

hairy paws, with sides painted with scales and bosses, and with a face like the face of a just man." Geryon is the symbol of Fraud, and though utterly monstrous and abhorrent to our understanding is approved of by higher reason. He is no falsity; he is true to the meaning that the poet wishes to convey. He represents Fraud more effectually perhaps than any incarnation that our senses have ever perceived.

In this case taste also the sense by which we are attracted or repelled from an object—must give way.

For what are we to say to this same hideous Geryon? What to all unlovely things? Are these to be unfit material for the poet, because our sense of the beautiful is repelled by them?

If we allow this sense-this asthesis-to estimate poetry, she will disallow much that reason justly allows; she will make us mawkish and sensual, lovers of a school of poetry and painting which nowadays is only too seductive, with its graceful, languid effeminacy and voluptuousness.

And yet, as in that divinest of Plato's dialogues, the Phædrus, Socrates veils his head in horror at having been induced to speak words of blasphemy against Love and Beauty, and hastens forthwith to offer reparation in a glorious palinode, so would I hasten to speak, as best I can, of a beauty, and a love for beauty, infinitely removed from sensuous idols and emotions a beauty inseparable from eternal truth, and one with it; a loveliness which we can love and adore