Page:Dr Stiggins, His Views and Principles.pdf/159

 of the time have absorbed the great moral principles which are, as I have said, the backbone of the modern commercial state. I do not know any of these gentlemen personally, I am sorry to say, but if we may judge from their writings, it must be, indeed, a blessed privilege to have their acquaintance, to imbibe, as from the fountain head, those precious streams of high ethical instruction which must well out alway from their lips. And they are by no means the mere pedants of the dull old days, the dry scholars with their quaint interest in purely literary theories, with their puzzle-headed and minute knowledge of antique and dusty tomes such as Chaucer and Shakespeare, learned in occult and useless lore of poesy, gravely discoursing of sonnets and epics, of rhymes and alliterations, acquainted, very likely, with the languages of ancient Greece and Rome. No; the modern critic is far from being of this grim old fellowship; as witness Mr. Arnold Bennett, who says in the columns of a great Liberal newspaper:—