letter of December 19, 1756, there is a passage of great importance on Epic and Lyric style, which exhibits as well perhaps as anything else the independence, and at the same time the transitional consistency, of Gray’s criticism. He says first (which is true, and which no rigidly orthodox Neo-Classic would or could have admitted): “The true lyric style, with all its flights of fancy ornaments, heightening of expression, and harmony of sound, is in its nature superior to every other style.” Then he says that this is just the cause why it could not be borne in a work of great length; then that the epic “therefore assumed graver colours,” and only stuck on a diamond borrowed from her sister here and there; then that it is “natural and delightful” to pass from the graver stuff to the diamond, and then that to pass from lyric to epic is to drop from verse to mere prose. All of which seems to argue a curious inequality in clearing the mind from cant. It _is_ true, as has been said, that Lyric is the highest style. But surely the reason why this height cannot be kept is the weakness, not of human receptivity but of human productiveness. Give us an _Iliad_ at the pitch of the best chorus of the _Agamemnon_, and we will gladly see whether we can bear it or not. Again, if you can pass from the dress to the diamond, why not pass from the diamond to the dress? It is true that in Mason’s case the diamonds were paste, and bad paste; but that does not affect the argument. When, in still a later letter (clxii.) to the same “Skroddles”[107] he lays it down that “extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry,” we must accentuate _one of the_. But there is a bombshell for Neo-Classicism in cvii., still to “Skroddles.” “I insist that sense is nothing in poetry, but according to the dress she wears and the scene she appears in.” Gray’s attitude to _Ossian_ is interesting, but very much what we should have expected. He was bribed by its difference from the styles of which he was weary; but he seems from the very first to have had qualms (to which he did some violence, without quite succeeding, in order to stifle them) as to its genuineness. [Sidenote: _The_ Observations _on Aristophanes and Plato_.]