, can still more
rarely form any part of their "ordinary conversation."

The low-bred heroes, and interesting rustics of poetry, have no sort of
affinity to the real vulgar of this world; they are imaginary beings,
whose characters and language are in contrast with their situation; and
please those who can be pleased with them, by the marvellous, and not by
the nature of such a combination. In serious poetry, a man of the
middling or lower order _must necessarily_ lay aside a great deal of his
ordinary language; he must avoid errors in grammar and orthography; and
steer clear of the cant of particular professions, and of every
impropriety that is ludicrous or disgusting: nay, he must speak in good
verse, and observe all the graces in prosody and collocation. After all
this, it may not be very easy to say how we are to find him out to be a
low man, or what marks can remain of the ordinary language of
conversation in the inferior orders of society. If there be any phrases
that are not used in good society, they will appear as blemishes in the
composition, no less palpably, than errors in syntax or quality; and, if
there be no such phrases, the style cannot be characteristic of that
condition of life, the language of which it professes to have adopted.
All approximation to that language, in the same manner, implies a
deviation from that purity and precision, which no one, we believe, ever
violated spontaneously.

It has been argued, indeed (for men will argue in support of what they
do not venture to practise), that as the middling and lower orders of
society constitute by far the greater part of mankind, so, their
feelings and expressions should interest more extensively, and may be
taken, more fairly than any other, for the standards of what is natural
and true. To this it seems obvious to answer, that the arts that aim at
exciting admiration and delight, do not take their models from what is
ordinary, but from what is excellent; and that our interest in the
representation of any event, does not depend upon our familiarity with
the original, but on its intrinsic importance, and the celebrity of the
parties it concerns. The sculptor employs his art in delineating the
graces of Antinous or Apollo, and not in the representation of those
ordinary forms that belong to the crowd of his admirers. When a
chieftain perishes in battle, his followers mourn more for him, than for
thousands of their equals that may have fallen aroun