irgil wished his AEneid to be burned,
elaborate as is its composition, because he felt it needed more labour
still, in order to make it perfect. The historian Gibbon in the last
century is another instance in point. You must not suppose I am going to
recommend his style for imitation, any more than his principles; but I
refer to him as the example of a writer feeling the task which lay before
him, feeling that he had to bring out into words for the comprehension of
his readers a great and complicated scene, and wishing that those words
should be adequate to his undertaking. I think he wrote the first chapter
of his History three times over; it was not that he corrected or improved
the first copy; but he put his first essay, and then his second, aside--he
recast his matter, till he had hit the precise exhibition of it which he
thought demanded by his subject.

Now in all these instances, I wish you to observe, that what I have
admitted about literary workmanship differs from the doctrine which I am
opposing in this,--that the mere dealer in words cares little or nothing
for the subject which he is embellishing, but can paint and gild anything
whatever to order; whereas the artist, whom I am acknowledging, has his
great or rich visions before him, and his only aim is to bring out what he
thinks or what he feels in a way adequate to the thing spoken of, and
appropriate to the speaker.

7.

The illustration which I have been borrowing from the Fine Arts will
enable me to go a step further. I have been showing the connection of the
thought with the language in literary composition; and in doing so I have
exposed the unphilosophical notion, that the language was an extra which
could be dispensed with, and provided to order according to the demand.
But I have not yet brought out, what immediately follows from this, and
which was the second point which I had to show, viz., that to be capable
of easy translation is no test of the excellence of a composition. If I
must say what I think, I should lay down, with little hesitation, that the
truth was almost the reverse of this doctrine. Nor are many words required
to show it. Such a doctrine, as is contained in the passage of the author
whom I quoted when I began, goes upon the assumption that one language is
just like another language,--that every language has all the ideas, turns
of thought, delicacies of expression, figures, associations, abstractions,
points of view, whi