In all modern languages, though no doubt not in Greek, “Imitation” carries with it a fatal suggestion of copying previous examples of art, and not going direct to Nature at all. I think there is no reasonable doubt that this suggestion is responsible by itself for much of the mistakes of modern “Classical” criticism in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. You must “imitate” Homer, Virgil, Milton, not “represent” Nature. Footnote 43: Those who do not care to “grapple with whole libraries” will find excellent handlings of the question in Butcher, _op. cit._, pp. 236-237, and Egger, _op. cit._, pp. 267-300. Yet the advantages of this criticism far exceed its drawbacks. In the first place it is, not merely so far as we positively know, [Sidenote: _Overbalance of merit._] but by all legitimate inference, the earliest formal treatise on the art in European literature. In the second place, even if it sticks rather too close to its individual subject, that individual subject was, as it happens, so marvellously rich and perfect that no such great harm is done. A man will always be handicapped by attempting to base criticism on a single literature, yet he who knows Greek only will be in far better case than he who only knows any one other, except in so far as the knowledge of any later literature inevitably conveys an indirect dose of knowledge of Greek. Then, too, Aristotle’s use of his material is quite astonishingly judicious. In almost every single instance we might [Sidenote: _The doctrine of_ ἁμαρτία.] expect his limitations to do him more harm than they have done. He might, for instance, with far more excuse than Wordsworth, have fallen into Wordsworth’s error of considering metre not merely as not essential to poetry, but as only accidentally connected with it. And it is also extremely remarkable how little, on the whole, his ethical preoccupation carries him away. He exhibits it; but it does not blind him (as it had blinded even Plato) to the fact that the special end of Art is pleasure, that the perfection of literature is not an end in itself but a means to an end. Even more surprising is the acuteness, the sufficiency, and the far-reaching character of his doctrine of the Tragic ἁμαρτία. For there can be no question that he has here hit on the real differentia of tragedy—a differentia existing as well in the tragedy of Character, which he rather pooh-poohs, and in the Romantic tragedy which he did not know, and on his actual principles was bound to disapprove if he had known it, as in the Classical. Shakespeare joins hands with Æschylus (and both stand thus more sharply contrasted with inferior tragedians than in any other point) in making their chief tragic engine “the pity of it,” the sense that there is infinite excuse, but no positive justification, for the acts which bring their heroes and heroines to misfortune. Wherever the tragedian, of whatever style and