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 be great enough to know and let us know it on better authority than a pigmy's? Such champions as please may fight out on either side their battle of the sandbags and windbags between this hour and the next; I am content to assume, and am not careful to dispute in defence of the assumption, that the qualities which make men great and the work of men famous are now what they were, and will be what they are: that there is no progress and no degeneracy traceable from Æschylus to Shakespeare, from Athenian sculptors to Venetian painters; that the gifts of genius are diverse, but the quality is one; and—though this be a paradox—that this quality does not wait till a man be dead to descend on him and belong to him; that his special working power does not of necessity begin with the cessation of it, and that the dawn of his faculty cannot reasonably be dated from the hour of its extinction. If this paradox be not utterly untenable, it follows that dead men of genius had genius even when yet alive, and did not begin to be great men by ceasing to be men at all; and that so far we have no cause to distrust the evidence of reason which proves us the greatness of men past when it proves to us by the same process of testimony the greatness of men present.

Here for example in the work of Mr. Rossetti, besides that particular colour and flavour which distinguishes each master's work from that of all other masters, and by want of which you may tell merely good work from wholly great work, the general qualities of all great poetry are separately visible and divisible; strength, sweetness, affluence, simplicity, depth, light, harmony, variety, bodily grace and range of mind and force of soul