s forwarded by
having its attention fixt on the best things; and here is a tribunal,
free from all suspicion of national and provincial partiality, putting a
stamp on the best things and recommending them for general honor and
acceptance." Then he added the shrewd suggestion that there would be
direct advantage to each race in seeing which of its own great men had
been promoted to the little group of supreme leaders, since "a nation is
furthered by recognition of its real gifts and successes; it is
encouraged to develop them further."

Who, then, are the supreme leaders in the several departments of human
endeavor? By common consent of mankind who are the supreme soldiers, the
supreme painters, the supreme poets? To attempt to name them is as
difficult as it is dangerous; but the effort itself may be profitable,
even if the ultimate result is not wholly satisfactory. To undertake
this is not to revive the puerile debate as to whether Washington or
Napoleon was the greater man; rather it is a frank admission that both
were preeminent, with the further inquiry as to those others who may
have achieved a supremacy commensurate with theirs. To seek out these
indisputable masters is not to imitate the vain desire of the pedagog to
give marks to the several geniuses, and to grade the greatest of men as
if they were school-boys. There is no pedantry in striving to ascertain
the list of the lonely few whom the assembled nations are all willing
now to greet as the assured masters of the several arts.

The selection made by a single race or by a single century is not likely
to be widely or permanently acceptable. Long years ago the Italians were
wont to speak of the Four Poets, _quattro poete_, meaning thereby Dante,
Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso. But this was a choice far too local and
far too narrow. Of these four Italian poets perhaps only the severe
Florentine has won his way outside of the boundaries of the language he
did so much to ennoble,--altho it may be admitted that the gentle
Petrarch had also for a century a wide influence on the lyrists of other
tongues.

Lowell had a more cosmopolitan outlook on literature, when he discust
'The Five Indispensable Authors'--Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakspere,
and Goethe. "Their universal and perennial application to our
consciousness and our experience accounts for their permanence and
insures their immortality." We may admit that all five of the authors
designated by Lowell are t