We need not demand from Shakespeare or from Moliere other morality than that which Genius unconsciously throws around it--the natural light which it reflects; but if some great principle which guides us practically in the daily intercourse with men becomes in the general lustre more clear and more pronounced, we gain doubly, by the general tendency and the particular result.
*[I use the word Poet in its proper sense, as applicable to any writer, whether in verse or prose, who invents or creates.] Long since, in searching for new regions in the Art to which I am a servant, it seemed to me that they might be found lying far, and rarely trodden, beyond that range of conventional morality in which Novelist after Novelist had entrenched himself--amongst those subtle recesses in the ethics of human life in which Truth and Falsehood dwell undisturbed and unseparated.

The vast and dark Poetry around us--the Poetry of Modern Civilisation and Daily Existence, is shut out from us in much, by the shadowy giants of Prejudice and Fear.

He who would arrive at the Fairy Land must face the Phantoms.

Betimes, I set myself to the task of investigating the motley world to which our progress in humanity--has attained, caring little what misrepresentation I incurred, what hostility I provoked, in searching through a devious labyrinth for the foot-tracks of Truth.
In the pursuit of this object, I am, not vainly, conscious that I have had my influence on my time--that I have contributed, though humbly and indirectly, to the benefits which Public Opinion has extorted from Governments and Laws.

While (to content myself with a single example) the ignorant or malicious were decrying the moral of Paul Clifford, I consoled myself with perceiving that its truths had stricken deep--that many, whom formal essays might not reach, were enlisted by the picture and the popular force of Fiction into the service of that large and Catholic Humanity which frankly examines into the causes of crime, which ameliorates the ills of society by seeking to amend the circumstances by which they are occasioned; and commences the great work of justice to mankind by proportioning the punishment to the offence.