It is, then, in conformity, not with any presumptuous conviction of
his own superiority, but with his common experience and common-sense,
that every author who addresses an English audience in serious earnest
is permitted to feel that his final sentence rests not with the jury
before which he is first heard. The literary history of the day
consists of a series of judgments set aside.

But this uncertainty must more essentially betide every student,
however lowly, in the school I have called the Intellectual, which
must ever be more or less at variance with the popular canons. It is
its hard necessity to vex and disturb the lazy quietude of vulgar
taste; for unless it did so, it could neither elevate nor move. He
who resigns the Dutch art for the Italian must continue through the
dark to explore the principles upon which he founds his design, to
which he adapts his execution; in hope or in despondence still
faithful to the theory which cares less for the amount of interest
created than for the sources from which the interest is to be drawn;
seeking in action the movement of the grander passions or the subtler
springs of conduct, seeking in repose the colouring of intellectual
beauty.

The Low and the High of Art are not very readily comprehended. They
depend not upon the worldly degree or the physical condition of the
characters delineated; they depend entirely upon the quality of the
emotion which the characters are intended to excite,--namely, whether
of sympathy for something low, or of admiration for something high.
There is nothing high in a boor's head by Teniers, there is nothing
low in a boor's head by Guido. What makes the difference between the
two? The absence or presence of the Ideal! But every one can judge