As fine an example as any of the prose imagination, of the intellect acting pictorially, is where Hobbes compares the Papacy to the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting upon its tomb. This implies a foregone personification, but the pleasure it gives springs chiefly from our sense of its historic and intellectual truth. And this subordinate form of imagination uses typically and metaphorically those forms in which ecstasy had formerly visibly clothed itself, flesh-and-blooded itself, so to speak; as where Lord Bacon says that Persecution in the name of Religion is “to bring down the Holy Ghost, not in the likeness of a dove, but in the shape of a vulture or a raven.” After reading more extracts from the poem, Mr. Lowell concluded his lecture in these words: Truly it seems to me that I can feel a heart beat all through this old poem, a manly, trustful, and tender one. There are some men who have what may be called a vindictive love of Truth--whose love of it, indeed, seems to be only another form of hatred to their neighbor. They put crooked pins on the stool of repentance before they invite the erring to sit down on it. Our brother Langland is plainly not one of these. What I especially find to our purpose in Piers Ploughman, as I said before, is that it defines with tolerable exactness those impulses which our poetry has received from the Anglo-Saxon as distinguished from the Anglo-Norman element of our race. It is a common Yankee proverb that there is a great deal of human nature in man. I think it especially true of the Anglo-Saxon man. We find in this poem common sense, tenderness, a love of spiritual goodness without much sensibility to the merely beautiful, a kind of _domestic_ feeling of nature and a respect for what is established. But what is still more noticeable is that man is recognized as man, and that the conservatism of Langland is predicated upon the well-being of the people. It is impossible to revive a dead poem, but it is pleasant, at least, to throw a memorial flower upon its grave. LECTURE III THE METRICAL ROMANCES (_Tuesday Evening, January 16, 1855_) III