hour; he seeks to govern men by a powerful impression made upon their imaginations.
In the English Renaissance, so largely influenced by Latin literature, the same point of view is adopted by poets and writers of imaginative fiction. When William Caxton, the first English printer, published Sir Thomas Malroy's great collection of Arthurian stories, he announced that he had done so, that noble men might learn and imitate the manners and morals of knighthood. In his Fairy Queen Spenser contemplated the fashioning of a gentleman. And Sir Philip Sidney, in his Apology for Poetry, following Aristotle, placed poetry above history and philosophy, precisely because of its power to kindle the will to action; because of its superior potency in the formation of character and in leading and drawing us to as high a perfection "as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of."
We are now come to a second reason why literature is such a formidable power in the state. The first reason was that literature is a critical and discriminating and persuasive imitation of life, which sets up in the mind of readers a process of comparison frequently unfavorable to the actual order of the world. The second reason is that life itself is, to a far greater
