Directness is also a protection against that literature of egotism which is the excess into which subjective poetry easily falls. Legitimate when kept within bounds, the habit of putting oneself into what one writes can become an offence, and from this offence English literature is not free. No one can complain because Milton and Wordsworth are less detached than Shakespeare or Sophocles; but the subjectivity of Byron or Carlyle is very different. Their subject is continually darkened by the shadow of their personality; it suffers a partial, at times a total, eclipse. Childe Harold sees himself in all that he sees, projects himself into Belgium, Athens and Rome, and colours the bluest skies with the jaundiced hues of his temperament. This is almost equally true of Carlyle's pupils, Ruskin and Froude, and, among the moderns, of a swarm of minor poets and novelists, who display before the public the pageant of their indignant or bleeding hearts. Egotism is a fault of manners as much as of morals, and has its peculiar effect and its appropriate penalty. Its effect is to distract a man's attention from major to minor issues, from the large world to the small self; its penalty is that it wearies its audience, and the next generation, if not its own, dislikes the continual obtrusion of an element in which it has no interest. Hence oblivion, often unjust, is the punishment which the egotist suffers. Even our age, interested as it is in personalities, has little time to spare for those of Byron or Carlyle; it is too busy with the characters of its own contemporaries to trouble about those of its predecessors. But no Greek writer is forgotten for this cause. Whatever their other offences, the Greeks are free from literary egotism. Directness turned their eyes to the external world, and taught them to see even themselves from without.