chooling, to record all this
faithfully, who are making their bread by drawing dances of naked women
from academy models, or idealities of chivalry fitted out with Wardour
Street armor, or eternal scenes from Gil Blas, Don Quixote, and the
Vicar of Wakefield, or mountain sceneries with young idiots of Londoners
wearing Highland bonnets and brandishing rifles in the foregrounds. Do
but think of these things in the breadth of their inexpressible
imbecility, and then go and stand before that broken bas-relief in the
southern gate of Lincoln Cathedral, and see if there is no fibre of the
heart in you that will break too.

But is there to be no place left, it will be indignantly asked, for
imagination and invention, for poetical power, or love of ideal beauty?
Yes; the highest, the noblest place--that which these only can attain
when they are all used in the cause, and with the aid of truth. Wherever
imagination and sentiment are, they will either show themselves without
forcing, or, if capable of artificial development, the kind of training
which such a school of art would give them would be the best they could
receive. The infinite absurdity and failure of our present training
consists mainly in this, that we do not rank imagination and invention
high enough, and suppose that they _can_ be taught. Throughout every
sentence that I ever have written, the reader will find the same rank
attributed to these powers,--the rank of a purely divine gift, not to be
attained, increased, or in any wise modified by teaching, only in
various ways capable of being concealed or quenched. Understand this
thoroughly; know once for all, that a poet on canvas is exactly the same
species of creature as a poet in song, and nearly every error in our
methods of teaching will be done away with. For who among us now thinks
of bringing men up to be poets?--of producing poets by any kind of
general recipe or method of cultivation? Suppose even that we see in
youth that which we hope may, in its development, become a power of this
kind, should we instantly, supposing that we wanted to make a poet of
him, and nothing else, forbid him all quiet, steady, rational labor?
Should we force him to perpetual spinning of new crudities out of his
boyish brain, and set before him, as the only objects of his study, the
laws of versification which criticism has supposed itself to discover in
the works of previous writers? Whatever gifts the boy had, would much be
li