He begins by dismissing with a great subtlety of illustration the ancient principle that a sharp distinction can be drawn between prose and poetry, showing that it is not true that poetry differs only from prose by the presence of metrical restraint; but that while a severe logical structure must underlie poetry, prose can exhibit high imaginative qualities; and that the real distinction in literature is between the literature that is imaginative, and the literature that attempts merely the transcription of fact. He points out that the moment that argument passes from the mere presentation of a theorem and becomes a personal appeal, that moment is the border-line crossed; and that in the work of the historian the poetical element is to be found in the personal element of selection which is bound to come in, and which may then transform statement into art. “Just in proportion,” he says, “as the writer’s aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his work _fine_ art; and good art (as I hope ultimately to show) in proportion to the truth of his presentment of that sense; as in those humbler or plainer functions of literature also, truth—truth to bare fact, there—is the essence of such artistic quality as they may have. Truth! there can be no merit, no craft at all, without that. And further, all beauty is in the long run only _fineness_ of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within.” He goes on to say that imaginative prose is the special art of the modern world, “an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant, descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid.”