tence of the sublime written everywhere. With the exception of Mr. Browning, here or there we have no poct or dramatist who attempts it. We have elegant trifles and beautiful form in many volumes of second-rate contemporary verse. There never was a time when the science of poetry was understood until now. Our critics can tell you with mathematical certainty the number of poems as distinguished from pieces of verse every well-known man has written. But we are not producing any great poetry, and none of the sublime kind. This is the age of elegant poetic incentive, of exquisite culture, but it is too dainty. We do not rise much above a poem to a shoe, or an ode to a ringlet, perfumed with one of Mr. Rimmel's best admired distillations. We have a few poets who are continually trying to find out who or what the deuce they are, and what they meant by being born, and so on; but then these men are for the eclectic, and not the herd of sensible people. We have two men who have done noble work, Browning and Tennyson; but, speaking broadly, we find the sublime nowhere.

It is true you cannot force genius as you force asparagus; and these remarks are not intended to indict the age with having no poetic faculty or aspiration. Abundance of poetry of a new and beautiful kind does exist, but it is not of the lofty kind born to the men of old.

Turning eyes away from literature, take a few more of the arts. Before we go farther, let us admit that one art at least never reached sublimer recorded heights than to-day. The music of the generation just past is, I believe, in the front rank of the art. It is an art now in the throes of an enormous transformation. Not using the phrase in its slangy meaning, the music of the future is sure to touch splendours never dreamed of by that Raphael of the lyre, Mozart. The only art-Titans now wrestling are the musicians; not those paltry souls that pad the poor words of inane burlesques, but the great spirits that sit apart, and have audiences of the angels. These men, out of their own mouths, assure us that they catch the far-off murmurs of such imperial tones as never filled the ear of man yet. They cannot gather up the broken chords they hear.

They admit they have heard no more than a few bars of the great masters who are close upon us; but, they say, if they only reproduce the effect these preluding passages have upon them," Such harmonious madness from their lips would flow, the world should listen then as they are listening now."

Go to the Royal Academy and look round you. How pretty! How nice! How pathetic! But would you like to lend your arm to Michael Angelo, and go round those walls with him? He would prefer the rack, the gridiron of St. Laurence. It is true there is no necessity for the sublime; but those men who have been in the awful presence of such dreams as Night and Morning, by that sculptor, must be pardoned if they prefer it to the art you find in Burlington House. One of our great English poets said, speaking of the trivial nature of conversation at the beginning of this century, that if Lord Bacon were alive now, and made a remark in an ordinary assembly, conversation would stop. If casts of Night and Morning were placed at the head of the

staircase of Burlington House, no one with appreciation of art would enter the rooms; the strong would linger for ever round those stupendous groups, and the feeble would be frighted away. Of course, the vast crowd of art-patrons would pass the group with only a casual glance, and a protest against having plaster casts occupying ground which ought to be allotted to original work.

Read any speech Burke or Grattan ever spoke, and then your Times and the debate last night. How plain it becomes that from no art has the sublime so completely vanished as the orator's. Take those two speakers above, and run your eye over Cicero and Demosthenes, the four are of the one school, in the great style. Theirs is the large and universal eloquence. It is as fresh and beautiful, as pathetic, as sublime now as when uttered, although the occasions and circumstances are no longer of interest to man. The statistican and the poltroon and the verbatim reporter have killed the orator. If any man were to rise in the House and make a speech in the manner of the

ancients, the honourable members would hurry in from all sides to laugh. A few sessions ago a member rose in his place, and delivered an oration on a subject not popular with the House, but in a manner which echoed the grand old style. At once every seat for which there was a member present at the time was occupied ; and the next morning the daily papers had articles which, while disposing of the speaker's cause in a few lines, devoted columns to the manner in which he had pleaded it,

To discover what has led to the decay of the sublime is not difficult, and even in an ignorant essay like this, it may be briefly indicated. Roughly speaking, it is attributable to the accumulation of certainties. Any handbook that cribs from Longinus or Burke will tell you the vague is essential to the sublime. To attain it there must be something half understood—not fully known, only partly revealed. To attain it detail must be lost, and only a totality presented to the mind. For instance, if a great lover of Roman history were suddenly to find himself on the top of the