how to distinguish the genuine from the false, the corn from the
chaff, gold from copper; or to perceive the wide gulf that separates
a genius from an ordinary man. Thus we have that bad state of things
described in an old-fashioned verse, which gives it as the lot of the
great ones here on earth to be recognized only when they are gone:

_Es ist nun das Geschick der Grossen fiier auf Erden,
Erst wann sie nicht mehr sind; von uns erkannt zu werden._

When any genuine and excellent work makes its appearance, the chief
difficulty in its way is the amount of bad work it finds already in
possession of the field, and accepted as though it were good. And
then if, after a long time, the new comer really succeeds, by a hard
struggle, in vindicating his place for himself and winning reputation,
he will soon encounter fresh difficulty from some affected, dull,
awkward imitator, whom people drag in, with the object of calmly
setting him up on the altar beside the genius; not seeing the
difference and really thinking that here they have to do with another
great man. This is what Yriarte means by the first lines of his
twenty-eighth Fable, where he declares that the ignorant rabble always
sets equal value on the good and the bad:

_Siempre acostumbra hacer el vulgo necio
De lo bueno y lo malo igual aprecio_.

So even Shakespeare's dramas had, immediately after his death, to give
place to those of Ben Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and to
yield the supremacy for a hundred years. So Kant's serious philosophy
was crowded out by the nonsense of Fichte, Schelling, Jacobi, Hegel.
And even in a sphere accessible to all, we have seen unworthy
imitators quickly diverting public attention from the incomparable
Walter Scott. For, say what you will, the public has no sense for
excellence, and therefore no notion how very rare it is to find men
really capable of doing anything great in poetry, philosophy, or art,
or that their works are alone worthy of exclusive attention. The
dabblers, whether in verse or in any other high sphere, should be
every day unsparingly reminded that neither gods, nor men, nor
booksellers have pardoned their mediocrity:

_mediocribus esse poetis
Non homines, non Di, non concessere columnae_.[1]

[Footnote 1: Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 372.]

Are they not the weeds that prevent the corn coming up, so that they
may cover all the ground themselves? And then there happens that which
has bee