200. Consider it as the unalterable law of Nature that all your power
upon others depends on your own emotions. Shakspeare wept, trembled,
laughed first at what now sways the public feature; and where he did
not, he is stale, outrageous or disgusting.
201. None but indelible materials can support the epic. Whatever is
local, or the volatile creature of the time, beauties of fashion and
sentiments of sects, tears shed over roses, epigrammatic sparkling,
passions taught to rave, and graces trained to move, the antiquary's
mouldering stores, the bubbles of allegorists--are all with equal
contempt passed over or crushed by him who claims the lasting empire of
the human heart.
202. The invention of machines to supersede manual labour will at length
destroy population and commerce;[41] and the methods contrived to
shorten the apprenticeship of artists annihilate art.
203. Expect no religion in times when it is easier to meet with a saint
than a man; and no art in those that multiply their artists beyond their
labourers.
204. Expect nothing but trifles in times when those who ought to
encourage the arts are content to debase them by their own
performances.
205. Mediocrity despatches and exults; the man of talent congratulates
himself on the success of his exertions--Genius alone mourns over
defeated expectation.
206. Pride.--Call not him proud who is influenced by the tide and ebb of
opinion.
207. Modesty.--The touchstone of genuine modesty is the attention paid
to criticism, and the temper with which it is received, or its advice
adopted; the most arrogant pretence, the most fiery ambition, the most
towering conceit, may fence themselves with smoothness, silence and
submissive looks--Oil, the smoothest of substances, swims on all.
208. Praise.--Despise all praise but what he gives who has been praised
for similar efforts; or his whose interest it is to blame.
209. Emulation.--The vindication of the innate powers, of the individual
dignity of man, careless of appendages and accidental advantage, grasps
the substance of its object.
210. Envy, the bantling of desperate self-love, grasps the appendages,
heedless of things. Emulation embalms the dead; Envy the vampire, blasts
the living.
211. Flattery, the midwife of half-born conceits and struggling wishes,
sometimes persuades, a boy that he is a man, a dwarf that he is a giant,
but too often enervates the limbs of energy.
212. Vanity.--The vain is the most humble of mortals: the victim of a
pimple.
213. Those reduced to live on the alms of genius, are the first to deny
its existence.
214. Shakspeare is to Sophocles what the incessant flashes of a
tempestuous night are to daylight.
215. Things came to Raffaelle and Shakspeare; Michael Angelo and Milton
came to things.