in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; in England less clearly in Marlowe, Shakspere, and Webster.  How monstrous in the latter did tragedy necessarily become! yet more repulsive in his tenderer companion-spirit, Ford.  In Greek sculpture, passing into convulsed and muscular forms or forms of relaxed voluptuousness, in Italian painting, in the romantic poetry of this century with us, the same stages are manifest.  Age parallels age.  Tennyson in artistic technique is Virgilian, we are aware of the style; but both Virgil and Tennyson remain classic in matter, in universality, and the elemental in man.  Browning in substance is Euripidean, being individualistic, psychologic, problematic, with special pleading; classicism had departed from him, and left not even the style behind.  The great opposition lies in the subject of interest.  Is it to know ourselves in others?  Then art which is widely interpretative of the common nature of man results.  Is it to know others as different from ourselves?  Then art which is specially interpretative of abnormal individuals in extraordinary environments results.  This is the opposition between realism and idealism, while both remain in the limits of art, as these terms are commonly used.  It belongs to realism to tend to the concrete of narrow application, but with fulness of special trait or detail.  It belongs to idealism to tend to the concrete of broad application, but without peculiarity.  The trivial on the one hand, the criminal on the other, in the individual, are the extremes of realistic art, while idealism rises to an almost superhuman emphasis on that wisdom and virtue, and the beauty clothing them, which are the goal of a nation’s effort.  Race-ideas, or generalizations of a compact and homogeneous people summing up their serious interpretations of life, their moral choices, their aspiration and hope in the lines of effort that seem to them highest, are the necessary matter of idealism; when these are expressed they are the Greek spirit, the Roman genius, great types of humanity on the impersonal, the national scale.  As these historic generalizations dissolve in national decay, art breaks up in individual portrayal of less embracing types; the glorification of the Greek man in Achilles yields place to the corruptions of the homunculus; and in general the literature of nationality gives way to the unmeaning and transitory literature of a society interested in its vices, superstitions, and sensations.  In each age some genius stands at the centre of its expression, a shining nucleus amid its planetary stars; such was Dante, such Virgil, such Shakspere.  Few indeed are the races that present the spectacle of a double-sun in their history, as the Hebrews in Psalm and Gospel, the Greeks in Homer and in Plato.  And yet, all this enormous range of life and death, this flowering in centuries of the human spirit in its successive creations, reposes finally on the more or less general nature of the concretes used in its art, on their broad or narrow