On the Use of Masterpieces by Arthur Quiller-Couch

If the exhortation of these verses be somewhat too high and stoical for you, let me return to Longinus and read you, from his concluding chapter, a passage you may find not inapposite to these times, nor without a moral:

"It remains" [he says] "to clear up, my dear Terentianus, a question which a certain philosopher has recently mooted. I wonder," he says, "as no doubt do many others, how it happens that in our time there are men who have the gift of persuasion to the utmost extent, and are well fitted for public life, and are keen and ready, and particularly rich in all the charms of language, yet there no longer arise really lofty and transcendent natures unless it be quite peradventure. So great and worldwide a dearth of high utterance attends our age. Can it be," he continued, "we are to accept the common cant that democracy is the nursing mother of genius, and that great men of letters flourish and die with it?