"And because it therefore has a better chance of grasping what is Universal than has the prudential wisdom of age which contracts its eye to particulars and keeps it alert for social pitfalls--the kind of wisdom seen at its best (but its best never made a hero) in Bubb Doddington's verses:-- "'Love thy country, wish it well, _Not with too intense a care_; 'Tis enough that, when it fell, Thou its ruin didst not share.' "Admirable caution! Now contrast it for a moment with, let us say, the silly quixotic figure of Horatius with the broken bridge behind him:-- "'Round turned he, as not deigning Those craven ranks to see: Nought spake he to Lars Porsena, To Sextus nought spake he; But he saw on Palatinus The white porch of his home--' "I protest I have no heart to go on with the quotation: so unpopular is its author, just now, and so certainly its boyish heroism calls back the boyish tears to my eyes. Well, this boyish vision is what Mr. Meredith chooses to trust rather than Bubb Doddington's, and he trusts it as being the likelier to apprehend universal truths: he believes that Horatius with an army in front and a broken bridge behind him was a nobler figure than Bubb Doddington wishing his country well but not with too intense a care; and not only nobler but--this is the point--more obedient to divine law, more expressive of that which man was meant to be. If Mr. Meredith trusts youth, it is as a time of imagination; and if he trusts imagination, it is as a faculty for apprehending the Universal in life--that is to say, a divine law behind its shows and simulacra. "In 'The Empty Purse' you will find him instructing youth towards this law; but that there may be no doubt of his own belief in it, as an order not only controlling men but overriding angels and demons, first consider his famous sonnet, 'Lucifer in Starlight'--to my thinking one of the finest in our language:-- "'On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose. Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened, Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose. Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those. And now upon his western wing he leaned, Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened, Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows. Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars With memory of the old revolt from Awe, He reached a middle height, and at the stars, Which are the brain of Heaven, he looked, and sank. Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law.'"