It is only by a wide comparison of facts that the wisest full-grown men can distinguish well-rolled barrels from more supernal thunder.
George Eliot (Mill on the Floss).
Let its teaching (the teaching of scientific and other books of information, the “literature of knowledge”) be even partially revised, let it be expanded, nay, even let its teaching be but placed in a better order, and instantly it is superseded. Whereas the feeblest works in the literature of power (poetry and what is generally known as literature), surviving at all, survive as finished and unalterable amongst men.... The Iliad, the Prometheus of Æschylus—the Othello or King Lear—the Hamlet or Macbeth—and the Paradise Lost, are triumphant for ever, as long as the languages exist in which they speak or can be taught to speak. They never can transmigrate into new incarnations. To reproduce these in new forms, or variations, even if in some things they should be improved, would be to plagiarize. A good steam engine is properly superseded by a better. But one lovely pastoral valley is not superseded by another, nor a statue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michael Angelo.
De Quincey (Alexander Pope).
De Quincey’s division of literature into “literature of power” and “literature of knowledge” still remains a useful classification.
A man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is in him.