Ye shades immortal, who by Freedom led, Or in the field or on the scaffold bled, Bend from your radiant seats a joyful eye, And view the crown of all your labours nigh. See Freedom mounting her eternal throne, The sword submitted, and the laws her own; See public power chastised beneath her stand, With eyes intent and uncorrupted hand, See private life by wisest arts reclaimed, See ardent youth to noblest manners framed, See us acquire whate'er was sought by you, If Curio! only Curio! will be true. Well, once more, Curio, _alias_ Pulteney, was _not_ true, but deserted Akenside's party and became Earl of Bath and possessor of no small part thereof. And private life and ardent youth were not reclaimed much in the days of the historic Charteris and the fictitious Lovelace. And the practical realisation of something like Akenside's undoubted principles and aspirations was the French Revolution fifty and the Russian Revolution nearer two hundred years later. But all this has nothing to do with the question whether in this passage also rhetoric, which hardly anybody will deny to it, has not passed under the influence and received the transforming force of poetry. I say it has, though I am perfectly willing to admit that it is not the best or the most poetical form of poetry, and that it is very far indeed from the forms that I myself like best. But one of the cries which the critic should never be tired of uttering, whether in the streets or in the wilderness, is that nothing is bad merely because it is different from another thing which is good, and that in this world there is no equality or fixed standard to which everything must be cut down or stretched out. The best rhetorical poetry of the eighteenth century is not the best poetry, but it is poetry in its own way, exhibiting the glow, the rush, the passion, which strict prose cannot, and which poetry can, give.