That is the excuse for the new books which will always be written every few years about Hebrew Religion, or Greek Art, or the French Revolution, or about such men as Plato, {9} St. Paul, Shakspeare, Napoleon. It is the excuse even for a much humbler thing, for the addition of a volume on Milton to the Home University Library. The object of this Library is not, indeed, to say anything startlingly new about the great men with whom it deals. Rather the contrary, in fact: for to say anything startlingly new about Shakspeare or Plato would probably be merely to say what is absurd or false. The main outlines of these great figures have long been settled, and the man who writes a book to prove that Shakspeare was not a great dramatist, or was an exact and lucid writer, is wasting his own time and that of his readers. The mountain may change its aspect from hour to hour, but when once we have ascertained that it is composed of granite, that matter is settled, and there is no use in arguing that it is sandstone or basalt. The object of such volumes as those of this Library is no vain assault on the secure judgment-seat of the world, no hopeless appeal against the recorded and accepted decrees of time. It is rather to re-state those decrees in modern language and from the point of view of our own day: to show, for instance, how Plato, though no longer for us what he was for the Neo-Platonists, is {10} still for us the most moving mind of the race that more than all others has moved the mind of the world; how Milton, though no longer for us a convincing justifier of the ways of God to men, is still a figure of transcendent interest, the most lion-hearted, the loftiest-souled, of Englishmen, the one consummate artist our race has produced, the only English man of letters who in all that is known about him, his life, his character, his poetry, shows something for which the only fit word is sublime.