"There is but one thing for it," the man responded. "There is ever before my eyes the fear of the police. Therefore I go back to my prison house till you are ready. But I have escaped once, and I shall escape again. Play me false, and I will come out and denounce you before a whole crowd of your painted butterflies. I could say to your medical Adonis----"The Countess touched Balmayne. She had turned her face away, fearful lest the expression of it should be seen.To an experienced mechanic a single glance at the tools on a lathe is a sufficient clue to the skill of the operator. If the tools are ground ready to use, of the proper shape, and placed in order so as to be reached without delay, the latheman may at once be set down as having two of the main qualifications of a first-class workman, which are order, and a knowledge of tools; while on the contrary, a lathe board piled full of old waste, clamp bolts, and broken tools, shows a want of that system and order, without which no amount of hand skill can make an efficient workman.The De Rerum Natura is the greatest of Roman poems, because it is just the one work where the abstract genius of Rome met with a subject combining an abstract form with the interest and inspiration of concrete reality; where negation works with a greater power than assertion; where the satire is directed against follies more wide-spread and enduring than any others; where the teaching in some most essential points can never be superseded; and where dependence on a Greek model left the poet free to contribute from his own imagination those elements to which the poetic value of his work is entirely due. By a curious coincidence, the great poet of mediaeval Italy attained success by the employment of a somewhat similar method. Dante represented, it is true, in their victorious combination, three influences against which Lucretius waged an unrelenting warfarereligion, the idealising love of woman, and the spiritualistic philosophy of Greece. Nevertheless, they resemble each other in this important particular, that both have taken an114 abstract theory of the world as the mould into which the burning metal of their imaginative conceptions is poured. Dante, however, had a power of individual presentation which Lucretius either lacked or had no opportunity of exercising; and therefore he approaches nearer to that supreme creativeness which only two races, the Greek and the English, have hitherto displayed on a very extended scale.
