462
The classical is health; and the romantic, disease.
463
Ovid remained classical even in exile: it is not in himself that he sees misfortune, but in his banishment from the metropolis of the world.
464
The romantic is already fallen into its own abysm. It is hard to imagine anything more degraded than the worst of the new productions.
465
Bodies which rot while they are still alive, and are edified by the detailed contemplation of their own decay; dead men who remain in the world for the ruin of others, and feed their death on the living,—to this have come our makers of literature.
When the same thing happened in antiquity, it was only as a strange token of some rare disease; but with the moderns the disease has become endemic and epidemic.
466
Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt.
467
What a day it is when we must envy the men in their graves!