as literature has a
motive for applying itself to _their_ wants. The consequences are
showing themselves, and _will_ show themselves more broadly. It is
difficult with proper delicacy to seek illustrations amongst our own
living writers. Illustrations were all too easily found did we care to
enter on the task.

It is true that, during the currency of any year, whilst the quantity
is liable to indeterminate augmentation, ballads will be rather looking
down in the market. But that is a shadow which settles upon every
earthly good thing. No Greek book, for instance, amongst the many that
have perished, would so much rejoice many of us by its resurrection as
the comedies of Menander. Yet, if a correspondent should write word from
Pompeii that twenty-five thousand separate dramas of Menander had been
found in good preservation, adding in a postscript that forty thousand
more had been impounded within the last two hours, and that there was
every prospect of bagging two hundred thousand more before morning, we
should probably petition Government to receive the importing vessels
with chain-shot. Not even Milton or Shakespeare could make head against
such a Lopez de Vega principle of ruinous superfluity. Allowing for this
one case of preternatural excess, assuming only that degree of
limitation which any absolute past must almost always create up to that
point, we say that there is no conceivable composition, or class of
compositions, which will not be welcomed into literature provided, as to
matter, that it shall embody some natural strain of feeling, and
provided, as to manner, that it illustrate the characteristic style of a
known generation.

It might suffice for our present purpose to have once firmly
distinguished between the two modes of literature. But it may be as well
to point out a few corollaries from this distinction, which will serve
at the same time to explain and to confirm it. For instance, first of
all, it has been abundantly insisted on in our modern times, that the
value of every literature lies in its characteristic part; a truth
certainly, but a truth upon which the German chanticleer would not have
crowed and flapped his wings so exultingly, had he perceived the
original and indispensable schism between the literature of knowledge
and the literature of power, because in this latter only can anything
characteristic of a man or of a nation be embodied. The science of no
man can be characteristic, no man c