(_γγ_) From considerations such as these we conclude that the ideal figures of art must be sought for in the age of mythos, that is to say, speaking generally, in past times, where we shall find the soil most congenial to their growth. If such material is taken from the age we live in, whose most native form, as we actually find it, is tightly shut off from the imagination, it matters not how we regard it, then the modifications which the poet can hardly avoid making in it will not readily escape the appearance of a purely artificial and intentional composition. The Past entirely belongs to memory, and memory perfects the infolding veil of character, events, and actions in the vesture of universality, through which the particular external or contingent detail is unable to penetrate. Many trifling circumstances and mediating conditions, many varied and isolated phases of activity, are inseparable from the actual existence of an action or a character: in the mirror of memory all these insignificant details are obliterated. In this liberation of his work from what is accidental in the external fact the artist has a freer hand for his artistic powers of composition, when dealing with that which is individual and particular in it, if the actions, histories, and characters are borrowed from ancient times. He has, it is true, also historical memories, out of which he must mould a content conformable to the universal; but the picture of the Past possesses, as already observed, an advantage, taken simply as a picture of greater universality, while the manifold texture of mediating condition and circumstance, interwoven as it is in the entire framework of finite existence which surrounds it, offers him material ample enough to prevent his hand obliterating the individuality, which is essential to his work of art. The more closely we consider it, the clearer will be our conclusion that a heroic age has the advantage over later and more civilized times in that the isolated character and personality generally in such an age does not as yet find what is substantive either in the sphere of ethical custom, or moral obligation opposed to itself in the necessary embodiment of legal institution, and thereby presents immediately to the poet all that the form of the Ideal requires. Shakespeare has, for example, selected much material for his tragedies from chronicles and earlier romances, framed upon a condition of life which has not as yet received the impression of a fully articulated social order, but in which the energy of individuals, as emphasized in personal resolve and achievement, is still the prevailing characteristic. His genuine historical dramas have, on the contrary, a vein of historical substance running through them in the strictest sense, and for this reason lean farther away from an ideal exposition, although here, too, both circumstances and actions are made to fall in with, or are removed to suit, the unyielding