even like Dickens in some of his stories, to preach consciously that honesty is the best policy, or that selfishness is a vice; and, if so, must I not condemn a man from whom I have not only received an incalculable amount of innocent enjoyment, but imbibed--it is my own fault if I have not imbibed--many thoughts that have strengthened and stimulated the best elements of my nature? If I insist upon the moral influences, am I not confounding the poet and the preacher, and falling under the lash of I know not how many critical connoisseurs? If I renounce the preachers, I am renouncing some of the greatest artists, and indirectly sanctioning even such art as is worthy only of Holywell Street, and panders to the worst passions. I will say what I think. Great writers, it seems to me, may be great in two ways; and the greatest is he who combines them most thoroughly. The first-rate writer, in the first place, must--to use a frequently misapplied word--be a thorough realist. He is great in proportion to the width and depth of the truths which he grasps, and to which he gives the most perfect expression. When we read Shakespeare at his best, what strikes us is that he has expressed once for all some home-truth about human nature and the world, round which all inferior writers seem to have been blundering without ever achieving a complete utterance. More generally, every great period of our literature has been marked in one shape or other by a fresh realism, or what is called the desire to return to Nature: to get rid of the phrases which have become conventional and unreal, and express the real living ultimate truth. Shakespeare and the great men of his time were inspired by such a passion; they were animated by the desire to "hold the mirror up to Nature" and to portray real vivid human passion, for they had burst through the old mediæval chains of theological dogma, and were aroused to a sudden fresh perception of the beauties which had been unrecognised and misconceived by ascetic monks. The men of Pope's time, again, believed in what they, too, called the "religion of Nature," and tried to hasten the day when enlightened reason should finally crush what Berkeley called the "pedantry of courts and schools". Wordsworth and his followers inaugurated a new era by proposing a return to "Nature," because the language, which with Pope expressed a real meaning, had again become the conventional language of a narrow class of critics and the town. It is in all ages one great function of the imaginative writers to get rid of mere survivals; to forego the spectacles used by their ancestors as helps, which have now become encumbrances; to destroy the formulas employed only to save the trouble of thinking, and make us see facts directly, instead of being befooled by words. In that sense it is their great service that they break up the old frost of dreary commonplace, and give life and power, in place of an acceptance of mere