minds, are just alike; but all bear evident marks of separation on them.  Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we are Copies?” Genius, he thinks, is commoner than is sometimes supposed, if we would make use of it.  His book is a plea for giving genius its head.  He wants to see the modern writer, instead of tilling an exhausted soil, staking out a claim in the perfectly virgin field of his own experience.  He cannot teach you to be a man of genius; he could not even teach himself to be one.  But at least he lays down many of the right rules for the use of genius.  His book marks a most interesting stage in the development of English literary criticism.

X.—­GRAY AND COLLINS

There seems to be a definite connection between good writing and indolence.  The men whom we call stylists have, most of them, been idlers.  From Horace to Robert Louis Stevenson, nearly all have been pigs from the sty of Epicurus.  They have not, to use an excellent Anglo-Irish word, “industered” like insects or millionaires.  The greatest men, one must admit, have mostly been as punctual at their labours as the sun—­as fiery and inexhaustible.  But, then, one does not think of the greatest writers as stylists.  They are so much more than that.  The style of Shakespeare is infinitely more marvellous than the style of Gray.  But one hardly thinks of style in presence of the sea or a range of mountains or in reading Shakespeare.  His munificent and gorgeous genius was as far above style as the statesmanship of Pericles or the sanctity of Joan of Arc was above good manners.  The world has not endorsed Ben Jonson’s retort to those who commended Shakespeare for never having “blotted out” a line:  “Would he had blotted out a thousand!” We feel that so vast a genius is beyond the perfection of control we look for in a stylist.  There may be badly-written scenes in Shakespeare, and pot-house jokes, and wordy hyperboles, but with all this there are enchanted continents left in him which we may continue to explore though we live to be a hundred.

The fact that the noble impatience of a Shakespeare is above our fault-finding, however, must not be used to disparage the lazy patience of good writing.  An AEschylus or a Shakespeare, a Browning or a Dickens, conquers us with an abundance like nature’s.  He feeds us out of a horn, of plenty.  This, unfortunately, is possible only to writers of the first order.  The others, when they attempt profusion, become fluent rather than abundant, facile of ink rather than generous of golden grain.  Who does not agree with Pope that Dryden, though not Shakespeare, would have been a better poet if he had learned: 

  The last and greatest art—­the art to blot?