It is the object of the following pages neither to defend
poetry nor to account for it, but simply to study it as a social
institution. Questions of its importance, of the place which
it has held, or ought to have held, in the esteem of men, and
of the part which it is yet to play, are interesting but not
vital to one who is bent upon the investigation of it as an
element in human life. A defence is doubtless needed now
and then by way of answer to the pessimist like Peacock, or
to the moralist, the founder of states ideal or real, like Plato
and Mahomet. Scattered about the Koran are hints that
verse-making folk, like the shepherd's turncock, are booked
for an unpleasant future, although it is well known that the
prophet in earlier days had been very fond of poetry; while
Plato himself, if one may believe his editors, began as a poet,
but took to prose because the older art was declining; with
the change he turned puritan as well, and saw no room for
poets in his ideal state. Attacks of this sort, however, are as
old as poetry itself, which, like "the service, sir," has been
going to the dogs time out of mind, and very early formed
the habit of looking back to better days. For medieval rela-
tions these remembered arguments of Plato, backed by a
band of Christian writers, had put the art to its shifts; but
Aristotle's fragment1 served the renaissance as adequate
1 Twining, Aristotle, 2d ed., I. 183, thinks the original treatise was written as
a defence against the "cavils of prosaic philosophers" and the objections of Plato.