ligion, or Greek Art, or the French
Revolution, or about such men as Plato, {9} St. Paul, Shakspeare,
Napoleon. It is the excuse even for a much humbler thing, for the
addition of a volume on Milton to the Home University Library. The
object of this Library is not, indeed, to say anything startlingly new
about the great men with whom it deals. Rather the contrary, in fact:
for to say anything startlingly new about Shakspeare or Plato would
probably be merely to say what is absurd or false. The main outlines
of these great figures have long been settled, and the man who writes a
book to prove that Shakspeare was not a great dramatist, or was an
exact and lucid writer, is wasting his own time and that of his
readers. The mountain may change its aspect from hour to hour, but
when once we have ascertained that it is composed of granite, that
matter is settled, and there is no use in arguing that it is sandstone
or basalt. The object of such volumes as those of this Library is no
vain assault on the secure judgment-seat of the world, no hopeless
appeal against the recorded and accepted decrees of time. It is rather
to re-state those decrees in modern language and from the point of view
of our own day: to show, for instance, how Plato, though no longer for
us what he was for the Neo-Platonists, is {10} still for us the most
moving mind of the race that more than all others has moved the mind of
the world; how Milton, though no longer for us a convincing justifier
of the ways of God to men, is still a figure of transcendent interest,
the most lion-hearted, the loftiest-souled, of Englishmen, the one
consummate artist our race has produced, the only English man of
letters who in all that is known about him, his life, his character,
his poetry, shows something for which the only fit word is sublime.

There was much else beside, of course. The sublime is very near the
terrible, and the terrible is often not very far removed from the
hateful. Dante giving his "daily dreadful line" to the private and
public enemies with whom he grimly populates his hell is not exactly an
amiable or attractive figure. Still less so is Milton in those prose
pamphlets in which he passes so rapidly, and to us so strangely, from
the heights of heaven to the gutter mud of scurrilous personalities.
This is a disease from which our more amiable age seems at last to have
delivered the world. But Milton has at least the excuse of a long and
august