comic, adventurous, instructively tragic, it is in the interwinding with human affairs, to give a flavour of the modern day reviving that of our Poet, between whom and us yawn Time’s most hollow jaws.  Surely we owe a little to Time, to cheer his progress; a little to posterity, and to our country.  Dozens of writers will be in at yonder yawning breach, if only perusers will rally to the philosophic standard.  They are sick of the woodeny puppetry they dispense, as on a race-course to the roaring frivolous.  Well, if not dozens, half-dozens; gallant pens are alive; one can speak of them in the plural.  I venture to say that they would be satisfied with a dozen for audience, for a commencement.  They would perish of inanition, unfed, unapplauded, amenable to the laws perchance for an assault on their last remaining pair of ears or heels, to hold them fast.  But the example is the thing; sacrifices must be expected.  The example might, one hopes, create a taste.  A great modern writer, of clearest eye and head, now departed, capable in activity of presenting thoughtful women, thinking men, groaned over his puppetry, that he dared not animate them, flesh though they were, with the fires of positive brainstuff.  He could have done it, and he is of the departed!  Had he dared, he would (for he was Titan enough) have raised the Art in dignity on a level with History; to an interest surpassing the narrative of public deeds as vividly as man’s heart and brain in their union excel his plain lines of action to eruption.  The everlasting pantomime, suggested by Mrs. Warwick in her exclamation to Perry Wilkinson, is derided, not unrighteously, by our graver seniors.  They name this Art the pasture of idiots, a method for idiotizing the entire population which has taken to reading; and which soon discovers that it can write likewise, that sort of stuff at least.  The forecast may be hazarded, that if we do not speedily embrace Philosophy in fiction, the Art is doomed to extinction, under the shining multitude of its professors.  They are fast capping the candle.  Instead, therefore, of objurgating the timid intrusions of Philosophy, invoke her presence, I pray you.  History without her is the skeleton map of events:  Fiction a picture of figures modelled on no skeleton-anatomy.  But each, with Philosophy in aid, blooms, and is humanly shapely.  To demand of us truth to nature, excluding Philosophy, is really to bid a pumpkin caper.  As much as legs are wanted for the dance, Philosophy is required to make our human nature credible and acceptable.  Fiction implores you to heave a bigger breast and take her in with this heavenly preservative helpmate, her inspiration and her essence.  You have to teach your imagination of the feminine image you have set up to bend your civilized knees to, that it must temper its fastidiousness, shun the grossness of the over-dainty.  Or, to speak in the philosophic tongue, you must turn on yourself, resolutely track and seize that burrower, and scrub and cleanse him; by which process, during the course of it, you will arrive at the conception of the right heroical woman for you to worship:  and if you prove to be of some spiritual stature, you may reach to an ideal of the heroical feminine type for the worship of mankind, an image as yet in poetic outline only, on our upper skies.