Societies always decay from the top. It is therefore not enough, as the humanitarian would have us believe, that our leaders should act vigorously on the outer world and at the same time be filled with the spirit of “service.” Purely expansive leaders of this kind we have seen who have the word humanity always on their lips and are at the same time ceasing to be human. “That wherein the superior man cannot be equalled,” says Confucius, “is simply this--his work which other men cannot see.”[320] It is this inner work and the habits that result from it that above all humanize a man and make him exemplary to the multitude. To perform this work he needs to look to a centre and a model. We are brought back here to the final gap that opens between classicist and romanticist. To look to a centre according to the romanticist is at the best to display “reason,” at the worst to be smug and philistine. To look to a true centre is, on the contrary, according to the classicist, to grasp the abiding human element through all the change in which it is implicated, and this calls for the highest use of the imagination. The abiding human element exists, even though it cannot be exhausted by dogmas and creeds, is not subject to rules and refuses to be locked up in formulæ. A knowledge of it results from experience,--experience vivified by the imagination. To do justice to writing which has this note of centrality we ourselves need to be in some measure experienced and imaginative. Writing that is romantic, writing in which the imagination is not disciplined to a true centre is best enjoyed while we are young. The person who is as much taken by Shelley at forty as he was at twenty has, one may surmise, failed to grow up. Shelley himself wrote to John Gisborne (October 22, 1821): “As to real flesh and blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles; you might as well go to a ginshop for a leg of mutton as expect anything human or earthly from me.” The mature man is likely to be dissatisfied with poetry so unsubstantial as this even as an intoxicant and still more when it is offered to him as the “ideal.” The very mark of genuinely classical work, on the other hand, is that it yields its full meaning only to the mature. Young and old are, as Cardinal Newman says, affected very differently by the words of some classic author, such as Homer or Horace. “Passages, which to a boy are but rhetorical commonplaces, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply … at length come home to him, when long years have passed, and he has had experience of life, and pierce him, as if he had never before known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation for thousands of years, with a power over the mind and a charm which the current