" It is an error to regard this as excess of
adulation, or as built _originally_ upon hypocrisy. Undoubtedly the
expressions of this feeling are sometimes gross and overcharged, as we
find them in the very greatest of the Roman poets: for example, it shocks
us to find a fine writer in anticipating the future canonization of his
patron, and his instalment amongst the heavenly hosts, begging him to keep
his distance warily from this or that constellation, and to be cautious of
throwing his weight into either hemisphere, until the scale of proportions
were accurately adjusted. These doubtless are passages degrading alike to
the poet and his subject. But why? Not because they ascribe to the emperor
a sanctity which he had not in the minds of men universally, or which even
to the writer's feeling was exaggerated, but because it was expressed
coarsely, and as a _physical_ power: now, every thing physical is
measurable by weight, motion, and resistance; and is therefore definite.
But the very essence of whatsoever is supernatural lies in the indefinite.
That power, therefore, with which the minds of men invested the emperor,
was vulgarized by this coarse translation into the region of physics.
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