It is objected to 'new lights,' as far as I know, that we are apt to be too metaphysical, self-conscious, subjective, everything for which there are hard German words.

The reproaches made against myself have been often of this nature, as you must be well aware.

'Beyond human sympathies' is a phrase in use among critics of a certain school.

But that, in any school, any critic should consider the occasions of great tragic movements (such as a war for the life of a nation) unfit occasions for poetry, improper arguments, fills me with an astonishment which I can scarcely express adequately, and, pardon me, I can only understand your objection by a sad return on the English persistency in its mode of looking at the Italian war.

You have looked at it always too much as a mere table for throwing dice--so much for France's ambition, so much for Piedmont's, so much stuff for intrigue in an English Parliament for ousting Whigs, or inning Conservatives.