Let us return now to the former consideration.  It was stated that the poet is affected by every day incidents, which would have little or no effect on the mind of a general observer:  and if you ask the poet, who from his conduct may be the supposed advocate of the past as the fittest medium for poetic eduction, why he embodied the suggestions of to-day in the matter and dress of antiquity; he is likely to answer as follows.—­“You have stated that men pass by that which furnishes me with my subject:  If I merely reproduce what they slighted, the reproduction will be slighted equally.  It appears then that I must devise some means of attracting their sympathies—­and the medium of antiquity is the fittest for three several reasons. 1st.—­Nothing comes down to us from antiquity unless fraught with sufficient interest of some sort, to warrant it being worthy of record.  Thus, all incidents which we possess of the old time being more or less interesting, there arises an illative impression that all things of old really were so:  and all things in idea associated with that time, whether real or fictitious, are afforded a favorable entertainment.  Now these associations are neither trivial nor fanciful:{11} for I remember to have discovered, after visiting the British Museum for the first time, that the odour of camphor, for which I had hitherto no predilection, afforded me a peculiar satisfaction, seemingly suggestive of things scientific or artistic; it was in fact a literary smell! All this was vague and unaccountable until some time after when this happened again, and I was at once reminded of an enormous walrus at the British Museum, and then remembered how the whole collection, from end to end, was permeated with the odour of camphor!  Still, despite the consciousness of this, the camphor retains its influence.  Now let a poem, a painting, or sculpture, smell ever so little of antiquity, and every intelligent reader will be full of delightful imaginations. 2nd.—­All things ancient are mysterious in obscurity:—­veneration, wonder, and curiosity are the result. 3rd.—­All things ancient are dead and gone:—­we sympathize with them accordingly.  All these effects of antiquity, as a means of enforcing poetry, declare it too powerful an ally to be readily abandoned by the poet.”  To all this the painter will add that the costume of almost any ancient time is more beautiful than that of the present—­added to which it exposes more of that most beautiful of all objects, the human figure.

{11} Here the author, in the person of respondent, takes occasion to narrate a real fact.