emma between the extremes of sensual excess and of spiritual
exaltation, did not commend itself to him in the least." The only forms
of art to which he was keenly susceptible were those of oratory and
poetry. He had no ear for music, though he seemed to get a certain
exaltation from listening to it. In regard to painting and sculpture he
always professed himself incompetent, but he was not without decided
tastes. On his first visit to the Continent he was more attracted by
Rembrandt, Holbein, and Duerer than by the Italians; "these men," he
said, "grasped the idea of Christianity." Of Durer's four saints at
Munich he writes, "I could contemplate them with interest for hours; he
has contrived to give St. John an almost perfect expression of 'divine
philosophy'." In later years when he went to Italy he spent a good deal
of time in looking at early Italian pictures, and admitted that they
would soon have got a great hold upon him. But on the whole his attitude
to the arts (excluding those of language) was one of deferential
ignorance. He had not himself any artistic gifts; he did not even write
verses. Yet to his friends, as one of them says, "he never represented
the prose of existence. With all his gravity, with all his firm grip on
fact and material interests, he had the enthusiastic movement of the
world's poetry in him."--From the Memoir by R. L. Nettleship, Green's
'Works,' Vol. 3, pp. xxx-xxxiii.

B. HEGEL ON THE NOVEL

Among the mongrel forms of epic should be included the half descriptive,
half lyric poems which were popular among the English, dealing chiefly
with nature, the seasons of the year, etc. There belong also to this
division numerous didactic poems in which a prosaic content is dressed
up in poetic form, such as compendiums of physics, astronomy, and
medicine, and treatises on chess, fishing, hunting, and the conduct of
life. Poems of this sort were most artfully elaborated by the later
Greeks, by the Romans, and, in modern times, especially by the French.
Despite their general epic tone, they lend themselves readily to lyric
treatment.

More poetical, but still without the characteristics necessary for
definite classification, are romances and ballads. Being epic in content
but lyric in treatment, these products of the Middle Ages and of modern
times may be assigned to either class indifferently.

The case of the novel, the modern popular epic, is very different. Here
we find the same wealt