The provincial spirit exaggerates the value of its ideas for want of a high standard at hand by which to try them; it is hurried away by fancies; it likes and dislikes too passionately, too exclusively; its admiration weeps hysterical tears, and its disapprobation foams at the mouth. So we get the eruptive and aggressive manner in literature. Not having the lucidity of a large and centrally-placed intelligence, the provincial spirit has not its graciousness; it does not persuade, it makes war; it has not urbanity, the tone of the city, of the centre, the tone that always aims at a spiritual and intellectual effect. It loves hard-hitting rather than persuading. The newspaper, with its party spirit, its resolute avoidance of shades and distinctions, is its true literature. In England there needs a miracle of genius like Shakespeare to produce balance of mind, and a miracle of intellectual delicacy like Dr. Newman's to produce urbanity of style. The reader will ask for some practical conclusion about the establishment of an academy in this country, and perhaps I shall hardly give him the one he expects. Nations have their own modes of acting, and these modes are not easily changed; they are even consecrated when great things have been done in them. When a literature has produced a Shakespeare and a Milton, when it has even produced a Barrow and a Burke, it cannot well abandon its traditions; it can hardly begin at this late time of day with an institution like the French Academy. An academy quite like the French Academy, a sovereign organ of the highest literary opinion, a recognised authority in matters of intellectual tone and taste, we shall hardly have, and perhaps ought not to wish to have. But then every one amongst us with any turn for literature at all will do well to remember to what shortcomings and excesses, which such an academy tends to correct, we are liable, and the more liable, of course, for not having it. He will do well constantly to try himself in respect of these, steadily to widen his culture, and severely to check in himself the provincial spirit. _VI.--Some Illustrative Criticisms_ To try and approach Truth on one side after another, not to strive or cry, not to persist in pressing forward on any one side with violence and self-will--it is only thus that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious goddess whom we shall never see except in outline. The grand power of poetry is the power of dealing with things so as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new and intimate sense of them and of our relation with them, so that we feel ourselves to be in contact with the essential nature of those objects, to have their secret, and be in harmony with them, and this feeling calms and satisfies us as no other can. Maurice de Guérin manifested this magical power of poetry in singular eminence. His passion for perfection disdained all poetical work that was not perfectly adequate and felicitous.