Now this argument, carried up to this point, had been more or less held to by many critics and literary theorists before Scott.[1] True enough, they had mainly concerned themselves with poetry; yet they found the source of major poetry to be ultimately in a nakedness of language--made possible by what was taken to be the simplicity, spontaneity, and cohesion of Greek life--comparable to Scott's notion of nakedness of body. They differ from Scott in this: that almost uniformly, so far as my reading goes, all had been willing to admit that there was absolutely no hope for comparable artistic achievement in their own time; that such art could be produced only in simpler, earlier societies than their own; that, indeed, a characteristic of a mature society was that it had grown up beyond the young, crude, exuberant stage in which conditions were ideal for the cultivation of the esthetic sensibilities. The ideal time for the production of major art, they tended to conclude, was at that point in the history of a society when it was moving from the savage into the civilized. They were thus not absolute esthetic primitivists; but they were concerned nonetheless to tie art to its primitive origins, as for the most part they were concerned equally to celebrate their triumph over the limitations of such origins. So, to take one example, Thomas Blackwell, meditating Homer's achievement in his _Enquiry_, had written in 1735 that it does not "seem to be given to one and the same Kingdom, to be thoroughly civilized, and afford proper Subjects for Poetry"; and in the same work he later declared that he hoped "_That we may never be a proper Subject of an Heroic Poem_." Only by being a "Subject" for a heroic poem could the poet write one; for only then would he have available to him the living language--and thus the techniques--adequately to express that "Subject." This was to be a dominant refrain--matched, to be sure, by a counter-refrain, treatment of which is not immediately relevant here[2]--through the century. A significant number of critics and literary theorists would be willing to resign themselves to having a lesser art, if such resignation would mean that they could adequately celebrate the enlightened achievements of their own century. They worked out a method of historical analysis whereby they might construct "conjectural histories" of civilization which would allow them to place poetry and the fine arts in the long line of the evolution of culture toward their own time and to demonstrate, moreover, that even as the arts had come early, so philosophy, proper religion, the sciences, and all the highest forms of civilization had come late. Thus they could announce triumphantly that if they had lost something, they had gained much more.