It is natural to inquire, after dwelling so much on the practical power of English literature in society and life, what is its value in the world of art, in that sphere where questions of perfection in the form, of permanence in the matter, and the like, arise. If the standards of an academic classicism be applied, English literature will fall below both Latin and Greek, and the Italian and French, and take a lower place with German and Spanish, to which it is most akin. But such standards are pseudo-classical at best, and under modern criticism find less ground in the ancients. The genius of the English is romantic, and originated romantic forms proper to itself, and by these it should be judged. The time is, perhaps, not wholly gone by when the formlessness of Shakespeare may be found spoken of as a matter of course, as the formlessness of Shelley is still generally alleged; but if neither of these has form in the pseudo-classic, the Italian and French, sense of convention, decorum and limit, they were creators of that romantic form in which English, together with Spanish, marks the furthest original modern advance. The subject is too large, and too much a matter of detail, for this place; but it is the less necessary to expand it, for it is as superfluous to establish the right of Shakespeare in the realm of the most perfect art as to examine the title-deeds of Alexander's conquests. He condensed romanticism in character, as was said above; and in the power with which he did this, in the wisdom, beauty and splendor of his achievement, excelled all others, both for substance and art. The instinct of fame may be safely followed in assigning a like primacy to Milton. The moment which Milton occupied, in the climax of a literary movement, is, perhaps, not commonly observed with accuracy. The drama developed out of allegorical and abstract, and through historical, into entirely human and ideal forms; and in Shakespeare this process is completed. The same movement, on the religious as opposed to the secular line, took place more slowly. Spenser, like Sackville, works by impersonation of moral qualities, viewed abstractly; the Fletchers, who carried on his tradition, employ the same method, which gives a remote and often fantastic character to their work; nor was moral and religious poetic narrative truly humanized, and given ideal power in character and event, until Milton carried it to its proper artistic culmination in Paradise Lost. Milton stands to the evolution of this branch of poetic literature, springing from the miracle-plays, precisely as Shakespeare does to the branch of ideal drama; and thus, although he fell outside of the great age, and was sixty years later than Shakespeare in completing the work, the singularity of his literary greatness, his loneliness as a lofty genius in his time, becomes somewhat less inexplicable. The Paradise Lost occupies this moment of climax, to repeat the phrase, in