“Most men,” says Mr. Froude, “feel the necessity of being on some terms with their conscience, at their own expense or at another’s;” and one very popular method of balancing their score is by exacting from art and literature that serious ethical purpose which they hesitate to intrude too prominently into their daily lives, rightly opining that it gives much less trouble in books. So prevalent is this tone in modern thought that even a consummate critic like Mr. Bagehot is capable of saying, in one of his supremely moral moments, that Byron’s poems “taught nothing, and therefore are forgotten.” Et tu, Brute! Such a sentence from such a pen makes me realize something of the bitterness with which the dying Cæsar covered up his face from his most trusted friend. That Lord Byron’s poems are forgotten is rather a matter of doubt; that they are given over entirely into the hands of “a stray schoolboy” is a hazardous assertion to make; but to say that they are forgotten _because_ they teach nothing is to strike at the very life and soul of poetry. It does not exist to teach, but to please; it can cease to exist only when it ceases to give pleasure. Perhaps what Mr. Bagehot meant to imply is that it would be a difficult task to review Byron’s poetry after the approved modern fashion; to assign him, as we assign more contemplative and analytic poets, a moral _raison d’être_. Pick up a criticism of Mr. Browning, for example, and this is the first thing we see: “What was the kernel of Browning’s ethical teaching, and how does he apply its principles to life, religion, art, and love?”[3] It would be as manifestly absurd to ask this question about Byron as it would be to review Fielding from the standpoint adapted for Tolstoï, or to discuss Sheridan from the same field of view as Ibsen. With the earlier writers it was a question of workmanship; with our present favorites it has become a question of ethics. Yet when we seek for simple edification, as our plain-spoken grandfathers understood the word, as many innocent people understand it now, the new school seems as remote from furnishing it as the old. Browning, Tolstoï, and Ibsen have their own methods of dealing with sin, and richly suggestive and illustrative methods they are. The lessons taught may be of a highly desirable kind, but I doubt their practical efficacy in our common working lives; and I cannot think this possible efficacy warrants their intrusion into art. Great truths, unconsciously revealed and as unconsciously absorbed, have been, in all ages, the soul of poetry, the subtle life of fiction. These truths, always in harmony with the natural world and with the vital sympathies of man, were not put forward crudely as lessons to be learned, but primarily as pleasures to be enjoyed; and through our “sweet content,” as Burton phrased it, we came into our heritage of knowledge. To-day both poetry and fiction have assumed a different and less winning attitude.