ging not to a ruling caste merely, but to
all. A statesman in a political society resting on a substratum of
slavery, and admitting no limits to the province of government, was a
very different person from the modern servant of "a nation of
shopkeepers," whose best work is to save the pockets of the poor. It
would seem as if man lost his nobleness when he ceased to govern, and as
if the equal rule of all was equivalent to the rule of none. Yet we
hold fast to the faith that the "cultivation of the masses," which has
for the present superseded the development of the individual, will in
its maturity produce some higher type even of individual manhood than
any which the old world has known. We may rest on the same faith in
tracing the history of literature. In the novel we must admit that the
creative faculty has taken a lower form than it held in the epic and the
tragedy. But since in this form it acts on more extensive material and
reaches more men, we may well believe that this temporary declension is
preparatory to some higher development, when the poet shall idealise
life without making abstraction of any of its elements, and when the
secret of existence, which he now speaks to the inward ear of a few, may
be proclaimed on the house-tops to the common intelligence of mankind.

APPENDIX

A. AN APPRECIATION OF GREEN'S ESSAY

It is interesting to see how the leading ideas in his [Green's] mind
governed the treatment of an apparently alien material in his last piece
of academic work, the essay on novels, which gained the Chancellor's
prize in 1862. The essay has also the additional interest of being
almost the only record of his views on art and its relation to life. The
fundamental conception upon which it is based is one with which we have
already met. The world in its truth is a unity, governed by a single
law, animated by an undivided life, a whole in every part. But to human
apprehension it is fragmentary and mechanical, a chaos of elements of
which each is external to the other and all are external to our minds,
and in which chance tempered by familiarity seems to be the only law. To
exceptional men, or at exceptional crises in life, in the moments of
intense insight or emotion which philosophy calls knowledge and religion
faith, the weight of custom falls away, the truth breaks through the
veil, and the most trivial object or accident comes to reflect in
itself the whole system of nature or the whol