tive in
character; and poets--"of imagination all compact"--catch this new form
of life, and we call the picture poetry. All civilization, to the days
of Jesus, produced but one character, so far as we may read, worthy to
be thought entire gentleman, and this was Joseph, the Jew, premier of
Egypt. He is the most manly man of pre-Christian civilizations. Or
probably Moses must be listed here. Classic scholarship can show no
gentleman Greece produced. Greek soil grew no such flowers beneath its
radiant sky. Plato was a philosopher--not gentleman. Socrates was an
iconoclast, but not a manly man and helpful spirit. Greek heroes were
guilty of atrocious and unthinkable sins. Test them by this canon of
Alfred Tennyson: "I would pluck my hand from a man, even if he were my
greatest hero or dearest friend, if he wronged a woman or told her a
lie;" and, so tested, where must Greek heroes be classified? Greece
and Rome produced heroes, but not gentlemen. Julius Caesar was the
flower of the Latin race. Nothing approximates him. Great qualities
cluster in him like stars in the deep sky. But his ambition was like
to that of Milton's Satan, and his lust was a bottomless pit. As a
national heroic figure, Julius Caesar is dazzling as a sun at summer
noon; but as a gentleman he cuts poorer figure than Lancelot or Sir
Tristram. The gentleman is not an evolution, but a creation. Christ
created the gentleman as certainly as he created the world.

Now, literature is what Emerson says genius is, a superlative borrower.
The state of a civilization at a given time will gauge the poet's
concept. He can not pass beyond the world's noblest notions to his
hour. If Greece and Rome produced no man, settle to it that Greek and
Roman literatures will produce no man. Sculptor, as Phidias;
statesman, as Pericles; dramatist, as Aeschylus; general, as
Themistocles; stern justice, as Aristides,--Greece can show; and such
characters the historians, dramatists, and epic poets will delineate
and celebrate. Horace is a looking-glass, and holds his genius so as
to catch the shadows of men passing by. This poets do, and can do no
more. They are not strictly creative. We mistake their mission. God
has somehow kept the creative power in his own possession. Men can
appropriate; God can create. So what we find is, that ancient
literature never attempted depicting a gentleman. Those days had no
such persons. But Christ came and set men a-