Vida and those who followed him excused themselves, were accepted by their disciples, and have recently been eulogised by our newest Neo-Classics, as following Nature and Reason. [Sidenote: _The alleged appeal to Reason and Nature._] That they said—perhaps that they thought—they followed both is unquestionable.[41] But as a matter of fact their Law of Nature—like the Articles of War in Marryat’s novel—was a dead letter, owing to the proviso, from the first more or less clearly hinted at and latterly avowed, that all of Nature that was worth imitating had already been imitated by the ancients. As for the appeal to Reason, it is a mere juggle with words; and it is astonishing that at this time of day any one should be deluded by it. What Reason prescribes Invocations to the Muses? What Reason insists upon beginning at the middle instead of at the beginning? What Reason is there in the preference of the pale _académie_ of Drances to the Rembrandt sketch of the demagogue whom Ulysses cudgelled? of the shield of Æneas to the car of Achilles? of Sichæus to Sicharbas? What has Reason to say (more than she has to say against poetic transports altogether) against the exquisite and endlessly suggestive metaphor of “the tresses of the Mighty Mother” for the grass, with its wave, and its light, and its shadow, and the outline of the everlasting hills and vales as of the sleeping body beneath it? In all these cases, and in a hundred others, we may boldly answer “None and Nothing!” The true Reason—the Mind of the World—has not a word to say against any of these forbidden things, or in favour of any of those preferred ones. ----- Footnote 41: Cf. _Poet._, ii. 162. _Semper nutu rationis eant res._ ----- But there is, let it be freely enough granted, a false Reason which has, no doubt, very much to say against the one and in favour of the other. The warped and stunted common-sense, the pedestrian and prosaic matter-of-factness, which is no doubt natural enough in a certain way to mankind, had made little appearance during the Middle Ages. These Ages may be called, if any one chooses, childish, they may be still more justly called fantastic; but they were never prosaic. It might be said of their Time-Spirit as of the albatross, that “Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.”