Readers may be divided into four classes:

1. 1. Sponges, persons who absorb what they read and return it nearly in the same state only a little dirtied.

2. 2. Sand-glasses, who permit everything to pass away and are content to doze away their time in actual idleness.

3. 3. Strain-bags, who retain only the dregs of what they receive: sensuality and calumny, as, by the bye, the History of the Bible by a Mohawk for the use of the Mohawks containing only the stories of Cain and Abel, the assassination of Eglon, the very fat man, by Ehud a man left-handed, of Sisera asleep by Jael, David and Goliath, Judith and Holophernes, Herod's massacre of the Innocents and the last great conflagration.

4. 4. Great Mogul's diamond tiaras, who are equally rare and valuable.

Of the various causes which I mentioned as impeding the acquisition of a just Taste in the fine arts in general, but especially in Poetry, the one which more perhaps than any other, bears upon not only the subject of these Lectures, and which alone I can anticipate as likely to occasion perplexity, or misunderstanding, and the feeling of repugnance which arises in all well-constituted minds when paradoxes and seeming Protests against opinions established among men by common suffrages are obtruded on their attention, is the lax use of general terms;— or rather the extending this laxity of expression beyond ordinary conversation, in which it is not only natural but a necessary result of that process, by which words are for ever acquiring new shades of meaning. Thus, general terms are confined to one individual sense, such as ‘indorsed’, given by Milton in the expression—‘And elephants indorsed with towers.’ And vice versa, words originally expressing one particular thing extended to a whole class, as ‘Virtue’, which at first meant the possession or exertion of manly strength, thence transferred to Fortitude, or the truest and most appropriate Strength, and is now become the class term for moral excellence in all its different species.