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70 imagining what himself would do in a similar situation. Agis was Walter Maynard; brave, high-minded, devoted, and full of the noblest plans for his country and his kind; and yet with a certain vein of irresolution growing out of theories too fine for reducing into practice. But, in considering an author and his works as one, a sufficient distinction is not drawn between the ideal and the real: the last is only given by being past through the crucible of the first. He does not give the events of his life; but the deductions that have been drawn from those events. It is not that he has been placed in the circumstances that he paints; but a quick intuition born of quick feeling, and that power of observation, which is the first requisite in a poet, enable him to bestow actual life to his breathing pictures: while this life is necessarily coloured by the sentiments and the emotions of the giver. Every thing now depended on the death of Agis, whether it would take due hold on the sympathies of the audience. Courtenaye augured well from the profound silence;