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 powerless, as assuredly it can attract or allure the intellect or the senses of no creature above the level of apes and swine; but in the artist's eyes it is insufferable and damnable. Without spirit, without humour, without grace, it encumbers the scene as with dried and congealed filth. In the face of much exquisite work of painter and sculptor, poet and humourist, which is anything but conventionally decent, we cannot allow that art must needs "lean to virtue's side," and lend her voice or hand to swell the verdict or prop the pulpit of judge or moralist; but two things she cannot away with; by the very law of her life, by the very condition of her being, she is bound to reject whatever is brutal, whatever is prurient; Swift cannot bend her to the worship of Cloacina, Moore cannot teach her the lisp and leer of his toad-faced Cupids. Great men may sin by mad violence and brutality, like that fierce world-satirist who stood out with lacerated heart against all bitterest infliction and "envious wrath of man or God," a Titan blasted by the fires but not beaten by the strokes of heaven; but small men only can teach their tongues the tittering accent of a vicious valet, the wriggling prurience of such lackey's literature as is handed round on a salver to the patrons of drawing-room rhymesters and ante-chamber witlings. Ford was a poet, and a poet of high mark; he could not therefore, even in a meaner age, have learnt the whimper or the smirk of sentimental or jocose prurience; he could never have submitted to ignoble handling the sweet or bitter emotions and passions of sense or spirit; all torture and all rapture of the flesh or of the soul he would always have treated with the frank and serious freedom