Thus we have a formidable array of objections to the choice of present-day subjects: and first, it was objected and granted, that incidents of the present time are well nigh barren in poetic attraction for the many.  Then it was objected, but not granted, that their poetic or pictorial counterparts will be equally unattractive also:  but this last remains to be proved.  It was said, and is believed by the author, (and such as doubt it he does not address) that all good men are more or less poetical in some way or other; while their poetry shows itself at various times.  Thus the business-man in the street has other to think of than poetry; but when he is inclined to look at a picture, or in his more poetical humour, will he neglect the pictorial counterpart of what he neglected before?  To test this, show him a camera obscura, where there is a more literal transcript of present-day nature than any painting can be:—­what is the result?  He expresses no anxiety to quit it, but a great curiosity to investigate; he feels it is very beautiful, indeed more beautiful than nature:  and this he will say is because he does not see nature as an artist does.  Now the solution of all this is easy:  1st.  He is in a mood of mind which renders him accessible to the influences of poetry, which was not before the case. 2nd.  He looks at that steadily which he before regarded cursorily; and, as the picture remains in his eye, it acquires an amount of harmony, in behoof of an intrinsic harmony resident in the organ itself, which exerts proportionately modifying influences on all things that enter within it; and of the nervous harmony, and the beautifully apportioned stimuli of alternating ocular spectra. 3rd.  There is a resolution of discord effected by the instrument itself, inasmuch as its effects are homogeneous.  All these harmonizing influences are equally true of the painting; and though we have no longer the homogeneous effect of the camera, we have the homogeneous effect of one mind, viz., the mind of the artist.

Thus having disproved the supposed poetical obstacles to the rendering of real life or nature in its own real garb and time, as faithfully as Art can render it, nothing need be said to answer the advantages of the antique or mediaeval rendering; since they were only called in to neutralize the aforesaid obstacles, which obstacles have proved to be fictitious.  It remains then to consider the artistic objection of costume, &c., which consideration ranges under the head of real differences between the things of past and present times, a consideration formerly postponed.  But this requiring a patient analysis, will necessitate a further postponement, and in conclusion, there will be briefly stated the elements of the argument, thus.—­It must be obvious to every physicist that physical beauty (which this subject involves on the one side [the ancient] as opposed to the want of it on the other [the modern]) was in ancient times