Of significant application again is De Quincey’s denial of the truth of Lessing’s æsthetical assertion, that the sense of necessary and absolute limitation is banished from the idea of a fine art. On the contrary, he maintains this sense is indispensable as a means of resisting (and therefore realizing) the sense of freedom: “the freedom of a fine art is found not in the absence of restraint, but in the conflict with it.” So in literature. That certain rules of composition sustain themselves at all is due, according to Mr. W. Caldwell Roscoe, to the fact that creative genius of a high order is not impatient of forms, but rather loves, on the contrary, to have certain limits defined for it, and to be freed to some extent from “the weight of too much liberty.” Shakspeare, he adds, did not fret because tragedies are limited to five acts, nor Milton quarrel with the formal conditions of an epic poem. Here again shall we find in Wordsworth a passage to the point:— “In truth the prison, unto which we doom Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me, In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground; Pleased, if some souls (for such there needs must be), Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find brief solace there, as I have found.” The biographer of Edward Irving tells us how deeply he was affected when the decision of the presbytery against him removed him from the range of their control, so that, “notwithstanding all his independence, the profound loyalty of his soul was henceforth baulked of its healthful necessities.” He felt himself with a pang to be cast unnaturally free of restraint—“that lawful, sweet restraint, ... to which the tender dutifulness so seldom wanting to great genius naturally clings.”[9] Habits of instant and mechanical obedience are affirmed by Sir Henry Taylor to be those that give rest to the child, and spare its health and temper. Men are but children of a larger growth; and though as regards obedience to a Father which is in heaven, “mechanical” obedience may not be the word, yet is cheerfully implicit obedience the thing; obedience is the privilege of the child. “For obedience is nobler than freedom. What’s free? The vexed straw on the wind, the frothed spume on the sea. The great ocean itself, as it rolls and it swells, In the bonds of a boundless obedience dwells.” The next section takes up the same theme under another heading, and with a fresh set of variations. _THE SERVICE OF FREEDOM._ ST. MATTHEW xi. 29, 30.