Lofty example in comprehensive forms is, without doubt, one of the great standing needs of our race.  To this want it has been from the first one main purpose of the highest poetry to answer.  The quest of Beauty leads all those who engage in it to the ideal or normal man as the summit of attainable excellence.  By no arbitrary choice, but in obedience to unchanging laws, the painter and the sculptor must found their art upon the study of the human form, and must reckon its successful reproduction as their noblest and most consummate exploit.  The concern of Poetry with corporal beauty is, though important, yet secondary:  this art uses form as an auxiliary, as a subordinate though proper part in the delineation of mind and character, of which it is appointed to be a visible organ.  But with mind and character themselves lies the highest occupation of the Muse.  Homer, the patriarch of poets, has founded his two immortal works upon two of these ideal developments in Achilles and Ulysses; and has adorned them with others, such as Penelope and Helen, Hector and Diomed, every one an immortal product, though as compared with the others either less consummate or less conspicuous.  Though deformed by the mire of after-tradition, all the great characters of Homer have become models and standards, each in its own kind, for what was, or was supposed to be, its distinguishing gift.

At length, after many generations and great revolutions of mind and of events, another age arrived, like, if not equal, in creative power to that of Homer.  The Gospel had given to the whole life of man a real resurrection, and its second birth was followed by its second youth.  This rejuvenescence was allotted to those wonderful centuries which popular ignorance confounds with the dark ages properly so called—­an identification about as rational as if we were to compare the life within the womb to the life of intelligent though early childhood.  Awakened to aspirations at once fresh and ancient, the mind of man took hold of the venerable ideals bequeathed to us by the Greeks as a precious part of its inheritance, and gave them again to the light, appropriated but also renewed.  The old materials came forth, but not alone; for the types which human genius had formerly conceived were now submitted to the transfiguring action of a law from on high.  Nature herself prompted the effort to bring the old patterns of worldly excellence and greatness—­or rather the copies of those patterns still legible, though depraved, and still rich with living suggestion—­into harmony with that higher Pattern, once seen by the eyes and handled by the hands of men, and faithfully delineated in the Gospels for the profit of all generations.  The life of our Saviour, in its external aspect, was that of a teacher.  It was in principle a model for all, but it left space and scope for adaptations to the lay life of Christians in general, such as those by whom the every-day business of the world is to be carried on.  It remained for man to make his best endeavour to exhibit the great model on its terrestrial side, in its contact with the world.  Here is the true source of that new and noble cycle which the middle ages have handed down to us in duality of form, but with a nearly identical substance, under the royal sceptres of Arthur in England and of Charlemagne in France.