e music. I am
still unconvinced, tho the man who can not see it, we are told, should
at once retire to the place where there is wailing and gnashing of
teeth.

I am against all gnashing of teeth, whether for or against a
particular idol. I stand by the men, and by all the men, who have
moved mankind to the depths of their souls, who have taught
generations, and formed our life. If I say of Scott, that to have
drunk in the whole of his glorious spirit is a liberal education in
itself, I am asking for no exclusive devotion to Scott, to any poet,
or any school of poets, or any age, or any country, to any style or
any order of poet, one more than another. They are as various,
fortunately, and as many-sided as human nature itself. If I delight in
Scott, I love Fielding, and Richardson, and Sterne, and Goldsmith, and
Defoe. Yes, and I will add Cooper and Marryat, Miss Edgeworth and Miss
Austen--to confine myself to those who are already classics, to our
own country, and to one form of art alone, and not to venture on the
ground of contemporary romance in general.

What I have said of Homer, I would say in a degree, but somewhat
lower, of those great Ancients who are the most accessible to us in
English--AEschylus, Aristophanes, Virgil, and Horace. What I have said
of Shakespeare I would say of Calderon, of Moliere, of Corneille, of
Racine, of Voltaire, of Alfieri, of Goethe, of those dramatists, in
many forms, and with genius the most diverse, who have so steadily set
themselves to idealize the great types of public life and of the
phases of human history. Let us all beware lest worship of the
idiosyncrasy of our peerless Shakespeare blind us to the value of the
great masters who in a different world and with different aims have
presented the development of civilization in a series of dramas, where
the unity of a few great types of man and of society is made paramount
to subtlety of character or brilliancy of language.

What I have said of Milton, I would say of Dante, or Ariosto, of
Petrarch, and of Tasso; nor less would I say it of Boccaccio and
Chaucer, of Camoens and Spenser, of Rabelais and of Cervantes, of Gil
Blas and the Vicar of Wakefield, of Byron and of Shelley, of Goethe
and of Schiller. Nor let us forget those wonderful idealizations of
awakening thought and primitive societies, the pictures of other races
and types of life removed from our own: all those primeval legends,
ballads, songs, and tales, those pro