This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 edition. Excerpt: ...kinds of utility than one and that poetry serves the highest kind. This paragraph as it stands in the Dgfmce does not refer directly to the 84 game Four Ages; but in the original draught it did. And as the differences are considerable, a portion of that draught may be quoted: " In one sense Utility expresses the means for producing and fixing the most intense and durable and universal pleasure, and has relation to our intellectual being; in another it expresses the means of banishing the importunity of the wants of our animal nature; and surrounding us with security and tranquility of life, destroying the grosser desires, superstition, etc., and conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance between men as may spring from motives consistent with their own present and manifest advantage. The author of the F 01"-Ages of Poetry employed it solely in the latter sense. " Undoubtedly the promoters of Utility, in this limited sense, have their due praise; they have their appointed office in society; they follow the footsteps of poets and copy their creations into the book of familiar life, and their exertions are of the highest value so long as they confine their administration of the concerns of the infefior Powers of our nature within the limits of what is consistent with what is due to the superior ones. But whilst the sceptic deatroys gross superstitions, let him not, as some French writers have-don?' destroy the eternal truths written upon the minds and imaginations of men, Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the political eeonomist Combines labour, let them beware that the consequences of their sPcentsCulations do not tend, as they have in modern England, to?xaSl)erate at once the extremes ofluxury and want. Bu