only convenient but a genuine advance of knowledge.  But if you had to make a beetle, as men are making poetry, how much would classification help?  To classify in a science is necessary for the purpose of that science:  to classify when you come to art is at the best an expedient, useful to some critics and to a multitude of examiners.  It serves the art-critic to talk about Tuscan, Flemish, Pre-Raphaelite, schools of painting.  The expressions are handy, and we know more or less what they intend.  Just so handily it may serve us to talk about ‘Renaissance poets,’ ‘the Elizabethans,’ ‘the Augustan age.’  But such terms at best cannot be scientific, precise, determinate, as for examples the terms ‘inorganic,’ ‘mammal,’ ‘univalve,’ ‘Old Red Sandstone’ are scientific, precise, determinate.  An animal is either a mammal or it is not:  you cannot say as assuredly that a man is or is not an Elizabethan.  We call Shakespeare an Elizabethan and the greatest of Elizabethans, though as a fact he wrote his most famous plays when Elizabeth was dead.  Shirley was but seven years old when Elizabeth died; yet (if ‘Elizabethan’ have any meaning but a chronological one) Shirley belongs to the Elizabethan firmament, albeit but as a pale star low on the horizon:  whereas Donne—­a post-Elizabethan if ever there was one—­had by 1603 reached his thirtieth year and written almost every line of those wonderful lyrics which for a good sixty years gave the dominant note to Jacobean and Caroline poetry.

In treating of an art we classify for handiness, not for purposes of exact knowledge; and man (improbus homo) with his wicked inventions is for ever making fools of our formulae.  Be consoled—­and, if you are wise, thank Heaven—­that genius uses our best-laid logic to explode it.

Be consoled, at any rate, on finding that after deciding the capital difficulty of prose to lie in saying extraordinary things, in running up to the high emotional moments, the prose-writers explode and blow our admirable conclusions to ruins.

You see, we gave them the chance to astonish us when we defined prose as ’a record of human thought, dispensing with metre and using rhythm laxly.’  When you give genius leave to use something laxly, at its will, genius will pretty surely get the better of you.

Observe, now, following the story of English prose, what has happened.  Its difficulty—­the inherent, the native disability of prose—­is to handle the high emotional moments which more properly belong to verse.  Well, we strike into the line of our prose-writers, say as early as Malory.  We come on this; of the Passing of Arthur:—­