“At Ulubræ” was equivalent to saying in the dullest corner of the world, or anywhere. Ulubræ was a little town probably in Campania, a Roman Little Pedlington. Thomas Carlyle may have had this passage in mind when he gave to the same thought a grander form in Sartor Resartus: “May we not say that the hour of spiritual enfranchisement is even this? When your ideal world, wherein the whole man has been dimly struggling and inexpressibly languishing to work, becomes revealed and thrown open, and you discover with amazement enough, like the Lothario in Wilhelm Meister, that your America is here or nowhere. The situation that has not its duty, its ideal, was never occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable hampered actual wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere, is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom, believe, live, and be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself. Thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of. What matter whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth, the thing thou seekest is already with thee, here or nowhere, couldest thou only see.” {52} Or Comic? {53} _In pistrinum_. In the pounding-mill (usually worked by horses or asses). {54} _Or Tragic_? {55} _The old song of Percy and Douglas_, Chevy Chase in its first form. {56} _Or the Heroic_? {57} Epistles I. ii. 4. Better than Chrysippus and Crantor. They were both philosophers, Chrysippus a subtle stoic, Crantor the first commentator upon Plato. {58} _Summary of the argument thus far_. {59} _Objections stated and met_. {60} Cornelius Agrippa’s book, “De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum et Artium,” was first published in 1532; Erasmus’s “Moriæ Encomium” was written in a week, in 1510, and went in a few months through seven editions. {61} _The objection to rhyme and metre_. {62} The first of these sentences is from Horace (Epistle I. xviii. 69): “Fly from the inquisitive man, for he is a babbler.” The second, “While each pleases himself we are a credulous crowd,” seems to be varied from Ovid (Fasti, iv. 311):— “Conscia mens recti famæ mendacia risit: Sed nos in vitium credula turba sumus.” A mind conscious of right laughs at the falsehoods of fame but towards vice we are a credulous crowd. {63} _The chief objections_. {64} _That time might be better spent_. {65} Beg the question. {66} _That poetry is the mother of lies_. {67} _That poetry is the nurse of abuse_, _infecting us with wanton and pestilent desires_. {68} _Rampire_, rampart, the Old French form of “rempart,” was “rempar,” from “remparer,” to fortify. {69} “I give him free leave to be foolish.” A variation from the line (Sat. I. i. 63), “Quid facias illi? jubeas miserum esse libenter.”