ngs, and command them; they cannot be mimicked but by obedience; the
breath of them is inspiration because it is not only vocal, but vital;
and you can only learn to speak as these men spoke, by becoming what
these men were.

70. Now for direct confirmation of this, I want you to think over the
relation of expression to character in two great masters of the absolute
art of language, Virgil and Pope. You are perhaps surprised at the last
name; and indeed you have in English much higher grasp and melody of
language from more passionate minds, but you have nothing else, in its
range, so perfect. I name, therefore, these two men, because they are
the two most accomplished _Artists_, merely as such, whom I know in
literature; and because I think you will be afterwards interested in
investigating how the infinite grace in the words of the one, and the
severity in those of the other, and the precision in those of both,
arise wholly out of the moral elements of their minds:--out of the deep
tenderness in Virgil which enabled him to write the stories of Nisus and
Lausus; and the serene and just benevolence which placed Pope, in his
theology, two centuries in advance of his time, and enabled him to sum
the law of noble life in two lines which, so far as I know, are the most
complete, the most concise, and the most lofty expression of moral
temper existing in English words:--

_"Never elated, while one man's oppress'd;_
_Never dejected, while another's bless'd."_

I wish you also to remember these lines of Pope, and to make yourselves
entirely masters of his system of ethics; because, putting Shakespeare
aside as rather the world's than ours, I hold Pope to be the most
perfect representative we have, since Chaucer, of the true English mind;
and I think the Dunciad is the most absolutely chiselled and monumental
work "exacted" in our country. You will find, as you study Pope, that
he has expressed for you, in the strictest language and within the
briefest limits, every law of art, of criticism, of economy, of policy,
and, finally, of a benevolence, humble, rational, and resigned,
contented with its allotted share of life, and trusting the problem of
its salvation to Him in whose hand lies that of the universe.

71. And now I pass to the arts with which I have special concern, in
which, though the facts are exactly the same, I shall have more
difficulty in proving my assertion, because very few of us are as
cognizant