There would seem to be two different kinds of material upon which the poetic faculty can be employed. The old distinction of subjective and objective has become loose in usage, as is the fate of all definitions, but it is not a bad one for working purposes. If in the discussion of æsthetics we begin to qualify our definitions too exactly we are apt to finish up in a world of unintelligible refinements. Words when used in argument have not the same quality and should not be expected to perform the same functions as they do in poetry, qualities and functions the nature of which has already been suggested. All modern moralising, for example, has tended towards the rejection of such plain words as good and bad. We no longer speak of a good man and a bad man as the Old Testament and Bunyan did, and we can show very good reasons for the rejection. Psychology has taught us that it is quite unsafe to call any one just good or bad and leave it at that, and it is one of the achievements of modern literary art, particularly in the drama and in fiction, to explore with great subtlety the gradations by which good and bad merge into each other in a single character. Nevertheless, after such analysis has exhausted itself with every ingenuity, there remain the words good and bad, and in the ordinary communication of ideas we do know, with more or less precision, what is meant when some one of normal intelligence tells us that so and so is a good man or a bad man. And so with such words as objective and subjective in the consideration of æsthetics. It is perfectly true to say that no subject matter controlled by a poet’s art can ever be wholly one or the other, but it is also true to say that if a narrative poem like _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ is spoken of as being objective in nature, and a philosophical self-analysis like _The Prelude_ as being subjective, we know clearly enough what is meant. If we go further and say that in a work such as _King Lear_ we get the two natures perfectly combined in one organism, we are still talking without wilful obscurity, and we are explaining in a rough and ready way, and yet in a way that is, perhaps, as good as any other, why it is that a work like _King Lear_ shows poetry in its highest and most comprehensive exercise. It is not that _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, in presenting a graphic pageant of life external to Scott’s own personal experience, has nothing of that experience woven into it, nor is it that _The Prelude_ in its constant concern with Wordsworth’s own spiritual processes has no observation towers that look out on to the open road. But the external pageantry on the one hand and the self-analysis on the other are quite clearly the predominant motives of the respective poems, just as they are perfectly mated in _King Lear_, where there is at once everything of the vivid perception of a detached life that can be found in Scott, and everything of deep