The habit of keeping the eye on the subject, which is the essence of directness, discourages, and indeed excludes, conventionality, sentimentalism, fancifulness, which prevent a writer from seeing and recording life as it is. These failings are always with us, and as I have given one instance of their working in Ben Jonson's epigram and have discussed the matter elsewhere,[120] I shall pass to diseases which are more particularly modern, and with which directness is equally at war. [120] _The Greek Genius and its Meaning to us_, pp. 74 ff. The richness of the English language is in itself a danger. English, like Latin, lends itself superbly to ranting, a capacity discovered by the Elizabethans. Modern writers tend to more delicate excess, and have exploited the musical quality of English. This is clear from such a collection as the _Oxford Book of Victorian Verse_, which faithfully represents the output of the age, and contains some fine poetry, but also a very large percentage of what Horace called, _Versus inopes rerum nugaeque canorae_. There is an intolerable deal of sack to a very little bread among the imitators of Tennyson. To such rhetorical or musical trifles no better antidote can be found than Greek literature, for there is no rhetoric in it, and what melodious nothings it contained, were parodied in its own age and have scantily survived to ours. In general it avoided both by its directness. The rhetoric of Lucan or Byron, the predominance of sound over sense in some of Shelley and much of Swinburne arise because those poets shut their eyes to the real world and become lost in the music of words. The Greek, starting with facts, not with sounds or with feelings about facts, could not easily become the victim of words. The temptation did not arise for him, or if it did, his sin was easily detected. Herein he is a good model, especially for poets who are apt to lose sight of the earth and pass into an unearthly paradise of vague feelings. For the greatest poetry is the poetry of things, not of words, and to whatever regions the Muse may take her flight, she can only be safe if she starts from Earth, and keeps her communication with it open.