One of the striking features of the civilisation was the complete absence of a literary class or profession or group of families. They smiled at the “pure frippery” of European literature, which used imagination as a mere means of entertainment. It seemed a complete inversion of the natural order of things to make that faculty which was the prerogative of everyone who could speak, and the servant of the highest purpose of life, into a special art to suit the pleasure of the idler hours. They held that the man who had thought a thing out could express it best. So they trained up every citizen to the fullest power of lucid and final expression. In their language, so perfect was it, there was one best way of saying a thing; and everyone who knew the language aright and understood the thing could find this best way. Style as a matter of mere expression they laughed at as linguistic trickery; the force and life of everything lay in the idea, and the expression grew out of that and was a part of it, as the colour was a part of the flower. It was only a clumsy and inchoate language that could admit of style or literature as a special art; and it was trifling with one of the most divine faculties to prostitute it to the entertainment of leisure hours; it was to class imagination with the arts of the mimic, the buffoon, and the juggler. Art for art’s sake, one of the latest creeds of the writers of Europe, was to them almost blasphemy. It made the garment of ideas, the garb of human progress, into a separate entity, and the servants of God into the tailors of human folly, the dress more than the figure it clothed and the body more than the soul. Literature without the intensity of the loftiest purpose of the race was but a tinkling cymbal. Expression was the gift of nature to every civilised man, and woe to the race that neglected it in any of its individuals, the race that should divorce it from its ideas, that let the men who write filch the glory of those who think!