Exceedingly striking it is, that a thought should have prospered for one
hundred and seventy years, which, on the slightest steadiness of
examination, turns out to be no thought at all, but mere blank vacuity.
There is, however, this justification of the case, that the mould, the set
of channels, into which the metal of the thought is meant to run, really
_has_ the felicity which it appears to have: the form is perfect; and
it is merely in the _matter_, in the accidental filling up of the mould,
that a fault has been committed. Had the Virgilian point of excellence
been _loveliness_ instead of _majesty_, or any word whatever suggesting
the common antithesis of sublimity and beauty; or had it been power on the
one side, matched against grace on the other, the true lurking tendency of
the thought would have been developed, and the sub-conscious purpose of
the epigram would have fulfilled itself to the letter.
_N.B._--It is not meant that _loftiness of thought_ and _majesty_ are
expressions so entirely interchangeable, as that no shades of difference
could be suggested; it is enough that these 'shades' are not substantial
enough, or broad enough, to support the weight of opposition which the
epigram assigns to them. _Grace_ and _elegance_, for instance, are far
from being in all relations synonymous; but they are so to the full extent
of any purposes concerned in this epigram.
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