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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PAST AND PRESENT. New lamps for old ! HE estimation in which men hold the work of the past ages, progresses in a somewhat curious order. In our first ignorance we condemn it as barbarous or old-fashioned; on a slight acquaintance we begin to be attracted to it; and by degrees we are taken captive by the charms of antiquity, and fall into a blind pedantry that can see no beauty in anything that is new. To recover from this stage of love- sickness argues a. degree of native energy and independence which not all of us appear to possess. How strangely different are the lessons that men draw from the past! How differently they are affected by it! One man loses his hold on principle, and is carried away in the passing current of fashion. Another is mastered by some one style, dead to theworld in general, but alive to him, alluring and fascinating him until it has taken entire possession of him, and he is no more himself but the exponent of a style that has gone by. One artist finds in the very idea of style a hindrance; it stands in his way, and he cannot get over it. Another masters a style and bends it to his own will, compelling it to conform to his individuality and express his thought. Yet another makes use of it only as foothold for some fresh venture in art. Something is to be said for the devotee who kneels before the past and worships. But retrospect is not art; and it is more in the spirit of the nineteenth century to accept a given style as a starting point, ?not as an end. Those who went before have doubtless left tracks which must be useful to us, and we should be wasting time, were we to insist on finding out a way for ourselves where they have trodden for us a sure path; but we need not therefore follow them into regions which we have no want nor desire t...

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