strument of imitation, and poetry uses words and metre. However, not all metrical composition is poetry; the verses of Empedocles are philosophy rather than poetry,—they lack the quality of being imitative,—that is to say, it is not their chief object to depict. Aristotle attributes the genesis of poetry, not to any divine impulse, but to those imitative instincts of man, which are exhibited from earliest childhood, and to the intellectual pleasure which we feel in seeing a good imitation even of a painful subject, and in recognising that “this is that.” Poetry then is imitation, and according to this theory the merit of a good poem would be the same as the merit of a good photograph,—exact and mechanical resemblance. Aristotle, however, is not consistent to this view; he evidently admits the idea of some creativeness in the poet,—for instance, he says that some poets represent men as better than they really are; and he applauds the practice of Zeuxis, who, in painting his Helen, combined the beauties out of several fair faces. He seems to approach the modern point of view when he says (xvii. 2) that “Poetry is the province of a genius or a madman;” for the one can feign and the other feels stormy passions. But it must be observed that the word for “a genius” here, is merely “well-natured”—a word elsewhere used for one who has a good moral disposition, and generally for one who has natural gifts. In fact, the philosophy of the imagination was a part of psychology not at all worked out in the time of Aristotle; there was as yet no word to express what we mean by “imagination.” When Aris-
