Enough! This not only shows how that other rendering can be spoilt even to the point of burlesque by an attempt, on preconceived notions, to embellish it with metre and rhyme, but it also hints that parallel verse will actually resent and abhor such embellishment even by the most skilled hand. Yet, I repeat, our version of "Job" is poetry undeniable. What follows?

Why, it follows that in the course of studying it as literature we have found experimentally settled for us—and on the side of freedom—a dispute in which scores of eminent critics have taken sides: a dispute revived but yesterday (if we omit the blank and devastated days of this War) by the writers and apostles of vers libres. 'Can there be poetry without metre?' 'Is free verse a true poetic form?' Why, our "Book of Job" being poetry, unmistakable poetry, of course there can, to be sure it is. These apostles are butting at an open door. Nothing remains for them but to go and write vers libres as fine as those of "Job" in our English translation. Or suppose even that they write as well as M. Paul Fort, they will yet be writing ancestrally, not as innovators but as renewers. Nothing is done in literature by arguing whether or not this or that be possible or permissible. The only way to prove it possible or permissible is to go and do it: and then you are lucky indeed if some ancient writers have not forestalled you.

IV

Now for another question (much argued, you will remember, a few years ago) 'Is there—can there be—such a thing as a Static Theatre, a Static Drama?'

Most of you (I daresay) remember M. Maeterlinck's definition of this and his demand for it. To summarise him roughly, he contends that the old drama—the traditional, the conventional drama— lives by action; that, in Aristotle's phrase, it represents men doing, [Greek: prattontas], and resolves itself into a struggle of human wills—whether against the gods, as in ancient tragedy, or against one another, as in modern. M. Maeterlinck tells us—

There is a tragic element in the life of every day that is far more real, far more penetrating, far more akin to the true self that is in us, than is the tragedy that lies in great adventure.... It goes beyond the determined struggle of man against man, and desire against desire; it goes beyond the eternal conflict of duty and passion. Its province is rather to reveal to us how truly wonderful is the mere act of living, and to throw light upon the existence of the soul, self-contained in the midst of ever-restless immensities; to hush the discourse of reason and sentiment, so that above the tumult may be heard the solemn uninterrupted whisperings of man and his destiny.

To the tragic author [he goes on, later], as to the mediocre painter who still lingers over historical pictures, it is only the violence of the anecdote that appeals, and in his representation thereof does the entire interest of his work consist.... Indeed when I go to a theatre, I feel as though I were spending a few hours with my ancestors, who conceived life as though it were something that was primitive, arid and brutal.... I am shown a deceived husband killing his wife, a woman poisoning her lover, a son avenging his father, a father slaughtering his children, murdered kings, ravished virgins, imprisoned citizens—in a word all the sublimity of tradition, but alas how superficial and material! Blood, surface-tears and death! What can I learn from creatures who have but one fixed idea, who have no time to live, for that there is a rival, a mistress, whom it behoves them to put to death?

M. Maeterlinck does not (he says) know if the Static Drama of his craving be impossible. He inclines to think—instancing some Greek tragedies such as "Prometheus" and "Choephori"—that it already exists. But may we not, out of the East—the slow, the stationary East—fetch an instance more convincing?

V

The Drama of Job opens with a "Prologue" in the mouth of a Narrator.

There was a man in the land of Uz, named Job; upright, God-fearing, of great substance in sheep, cattle and oxen; blest also with seven sons and three daughters. After telling of their family life, how wholesome it is, and pious, and happy—

The Prologue passes to a Council held in Heaven. The Lord sits there, and the sons of God present themselves each from his province. Enters Satan (whom we had better call the Adversary) from his sphere of inspection, the Earth, and reports. The Lord specially questions him concerning Job, pattern of men. The Adversary demurs. 'Doth Job fear God for nought? Hast thou not set a hedge about his prosperity? But put forth thy hand and touch all that he hath, and he will renounce thee to thy face.' The Lord gives leave for this trial to be made (you will recall the opening of "Everyman"):

So, in the midst of his wealth, a messenger came to job and says—

The oxen were plowing, and the asses feeding beside them: and the Sabeans fell upon them, and took them away; yea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The fire of God is fallen from heaven, and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The Chaldeans made three bands, and fell upon the camels, and have taken them away, yea, and slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house: and, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped; and he said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

So the Adversary is foiled, and Job has not renounced God. A second Council is held in Heaven; and the Adversary, being questioned, has to admit Job's integrity, but proposes a severer test:

Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will renounce thee to thy face.

Again leave is given: and the Adversary smites job with the most hideous and loathsome form of leprosy. His kinsfolk (as we learn later) have already begun to desert and hold aloof from him as a man marked out by God's displeasure. But now he passes out from their midst, as one unclean from head to foot, and seats himself on the ash-mound—that is, upon the Mezbele or heap of refuse which accumulates outside Arab villages.

'The dung,' says Professor Moulton, 'which is heaped upon the Mezbele of the Hauran villages is not mixed with straw, which in that warm and dry land is not needed for litter, and it comes mostly from solid-hoofed animals, as the flocks and oxen are left over-night in the grazing places. It is carried in baskets in a dry state to this place ... and usually burnt once a month.... The ashes remain.... If the village has been inhabited for centuries the Mezbele reaches a height far overtopping it. The winter rains reduce it into a compact mass, and it becomes by and by a solid hill of earth.... The Mezbele serves the inhabitants for a watchtower, and in the sultry evenings for a place of concourse, because there is a current of air on the height. There all day long the children play about it; and there the outcast, who has been stricken with some loathsome malady, and is not allowed to enter the dwellings of men, lays himself down begging an alms of the passers-by by day, and by night sheltering himself among the ashes which the heat of the sun has warmed.'

Here, then, sits in his misery 'the forsaken grandee'; and here yet another temptation comes to him—this time not expressly allowed by the Lord. Much foolish condemnation (and, I may add, some foolish facetiousness) has been heaped on Job's wife. As a matter of fact she is not a wicked woman—she has borne her part in the pious and happy family life, now taken away: she has uttered no word of complaint though all the substance be swallowed up and her children with it. But now the sight of her innocent husband thus helpless, thus incurably smitten, wrings, through love and anguish and indignation, this cry from her:

Dost thou still hold fast thine integrity? renounce God, and die.

But Job answered, soothing her:

Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?

So the second trial ends, and Job has sinned not with his lips.

But now comes the third trial, which needs no Council in Heaven to decree it. Travellers by the mound saw this figure seated there, patient, uncomplaining, an object of awe even to the children who at first mocked him; asked this man's history; and hearing of it, smote on their breasts, and made a token of it and carried the news into far countries: until it reached the ears of Job's three friends, all great tribesmen like himself—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. These three made an appointment together to travel and visit Job. 'And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voice, and wept.' Then they went up and sat down opposite him on the ground. But the majesty of suffering is silent:

Here I and sorrows sit; Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it....

No, not a word.... And, with the grave courtesy of Eastern men, they too are silent:

So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great.

The Prologue ends. The scene is set. After seven days of silence the real drama opens.

VI

Of the drama itself I shall attempt no analysis, referring you for this to the two books from which I have already quoted. My purpose being merely to persuade you that this surpassing poem can be studied, and ought to be studied, as literature, I shall content myself with turning it (so to speak) once or twice in my hand and glancing one or two facets at you.

To begin with, then, you will not have failed to notice, in the setting out of the drama, a curious resemblance between "Job" and the "Prometheus" of Aeschylus. The curtain in each play lifts on a figure solitary, tortured (for no reason that seems good to us) by a higher will which, we are told, is God's. The chorus of Sea-nymphs in the opening of the Greek play bears no small resemblance in attitude of mind to job's three friends. When job at length breaks the intolerable silence with

Let the day perish wherein I was born, And the night which said, There is a man child conceived.

he uses just such an outburst as Prometheus: and, as he is answered by his friends, so the Nymphs at once exclaim to Prometheus

Seest thou not that thou hast sinned?

But at once, for anyone with a sense of comparative literature, is set up a comparison between the persistent West and the persistent East; between the fiery energising rebel and the patient victim. Of these two, both good, one will dare everything to release mankind from thrall; the other will submit, and justify himself—mankind too, if it may hap—by submission.

At once this difference is seen to give a difference of form to the drama. Our poem is purely static. Some critics can detect little individuality in Job's three friends, to distinguish them. For my part I find Eliphaz more of a personage than the other two; grander in the volume of his mind, securer in wisdom; as I find Zophar rather noticeably a mean-minded greybeard, and Bildad a man of the stand-no-nonsense kind. But, to tell the truth, I prefer not to search for individuality in these men: I prefer to see them as three figures with eyes of stone almost expressionless. For in truth they are the conventions, all through,—the orthodox men—addressing Job, the reality; and their words come to this:

Thou sufferest, therefore must have sinned. All suffering is, must be a judgment upon sin. Else God is not righteous.

They are statuesque, as the drama is static. The speeches follow one another, rising and falling, in rise and fall magnificently and deliberately eloquent. Not a limb is seen to move, unless it be when job half rises from the dust in sudden scorn of their conventions:

No doubt but ye are the people, And wisdom shall die with you!

or again

Will ye speak unrighteously for God, And talk deceitfully for him? Will ye respect his person? Will ye contend for God?

Yet—so great is this man, who has not renounced and will not renounce God, that still and ever he clamours for more knowledge of Him. Still getting no answer, he lifts up his hands and calls the great Oath of Clearance; in effect 'If I have loved gold overmuch, hated mine enemy, refused the stranger my tent, truckled to public opinion':

If my land cry out against me, And the furrows thereof weep together; If I have eaten the fruits thereof without money, Or have caused the owners thereof to lose their life: Let thistles grow instead of wheat, And cockle instead of barley.

With a slow gesture he covers his face:

The words of Job are ended.

VII

They are ended: even though at this point (when the debate seems to be closed) a young Aramaean Arab, Elihu, who has been loitering around and listening to the controversy, bursts in and delivers his young red-hot opinions. They are violent, and at the same time quite raw and priggish. Job troubles not to answer: the others keep a chilling silence. But while this young man rants, pointing skyward now and again, we see, we feel—it is most wonderfully conveyed—as clearly as if indicated by successive stage-directions, a terrific thunder-storm gathering; a thunder-storm with a whirlwind. It gathers; it is upon them; it darkens them with dread until even the words of Elihu dry on his lips:

If a man speak, surely he shall be swallowed up.

It breaks and blasts and confounds them; and out of it the Lord speaks.

Now of that famous and marvellous speech, put by the poet into the mouth of God, we may say what may be said of all speeches put by man into the mouth of God. We may say, as of the speeches of the Archangel in "Paradise Lost" that it is argument, and argument, by its very nature, admits of being answered. But, if to make God talk at all be anthropomorphism, here is anthropomorphism at its very best in its effort to reach to God.

There is a hush. The storm clears away; and in this hush the voice of the Narrator is heard again, pronouncing the Epilogue. Job has looked in the face of God and reproached him as a friend reproaches a friend. Therefore his captivity was turned, and his wealth returned to him, and he begat sons and daughters, and saw his sons' sons unto the fourth generation. So Job died, being old and full of years.

VIII

Structurally a great poem; historically a great poem; philosophically a great poem; so rendered for us in noble English diction as to be worthy in any comparison of diction, structure, ancestry, thought! Why should we not study it in our English School, if only for purpose of comparison? I conclude with these words of Lord Latymer:

There is nothing comparable with it except the "Prometheus Bound" of Aeschylus. It is eternal, illimitable ... its scope is the relation between God and Man. It is a vast liberation, a great gaol-delivery of the spirit of Man; nay, rather a great Acquittal.



[Footnote 1: It is fair to say that Myers cancelled the Damascus stanza in his final edition.]



LECTURE XI

OF SELECTION

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1918

I

Let us hark back, Gentlemen, to our original problem, and consider if our dilatory way have led us to some glimpse of a practical solution.

We may re-state it thus: Assuming it to be true, as men of Science assure us, that the weight of this planet remains constant, and is to-day what it was when mankind carelessly laid it on the shoulders of Atlas; that nothing abides but it goes, that nothing goes but in some form or other it comes back; you and I may well indulge a wonder what reflections upon this astonishing fact our University Librarian, Mr Jenkinson, takes to bed with him. A copy of every book printed in the United Kingdom is—or I had better say, should be—deposited with him. Putting aside the question of what he has done to deserve it, he must surely wonder at times from what other corners of the earth Providence has been at pains to collect and compact the ingredients of the latest new volume he handles for a moment before fondly committing it to the cellars.

'Locked up, not lost.'

Or, to take it in reverse—When the great library of Alexandria went up in flames, doubtless its ashes awoke an appreciable and almost immediate energy in the crops of the Nile Delta. The more leisurable process of desiccation, by which, under modern storage, the components of a modern novel are released to fresh unions and activities admits, as Sir Thomas Browne would say, a wide solution, and was just the question to tease that good man. Can we not hear him discussing it? 'To be but pyramidally extant is a fallacy in duration.... To burn the bones of the King of Edom for lime seems no irrational ferity: but to store the back volumes of Mr Bottomley's "John Bull" a passionate prodigality.'

II

Well, whatever the perplexities of our Library we may be sure they will never break down that tradition of service, help and courtesy which is, among its fine treasures, still the first. But we have seen that Mr Jenkinson's perplexities are really but a parable of ours: that the question, What are we to do with all these books accumulating in the world? really is a question: that their mere accumulation really does heap up against us a barrier of such enormous and brute mass that the stream of human culture must needs be choked and spread into marsh unless we contrive to pipe it through. That a great deal of it is meant to help—that even the most of it is well intentioned—avails not against the mere physical obstacle of its mass. If you consider an Athenian gentleman of the 5th century B.C. connecting (as I always preach here) his literature with his life, two things are bound to strike you: the first that he was a man of leisure, somewhat disdainful of trade and relieved of menial work by a number of slaves; the second, that he was surprisingly unencumbered with books. You will find in Plato much about reciters, actors, poets, rhetoricians, pleaders, sophists, public orators and refiners of language, but very little indeed about books. Even the library of Alexandria grew in a time of decadence and belonged to an age not his. Says Jowett in the end:

He who approaches him in the most reverent spirit shall reap most of the fruit of his wisdom; he who reads him by the light of ancient commentators will have the least understanding of him.

We see him [Jowett goes on] with the eye of the mind in the groves of the Academy, or on the banks of the Ilissus, or in the streets of Athens, alone or walking with Socrates, full of those thoughts which have since become the common possession of mankind. Or we may compare him to a statue hid away in some temple of Zeus or Apollo, no longer existing on earth, a statue which has a look as of the God himself. Or we may once more imagine him following in another state of being the great company of heaven which he beheld of old in a vision. So, 'partly trifling but with a certain degree of seriousness,' we linger around the memory of a world which has passed away.

Yes, 'which has passed away,' and perhaps with no token more evident of its decease than the sepulture of books that admiring generations have heaped on it!

III

In a previous lecture I referred you to the beautiful opening and the yet more beautiful close of the "Phaedrus." Let us turn back and refresh ourselves with that Dialogue while we learn from it, in somewhat more of detail, just what a book meant to an Athenian: how fresh a thing it was to him and how little irksome.

Phaedrus has spent his forenoon listening to a discourse by the celebrated rhetorician Lysias on the subject of Love, and is starting to cool his head with a stroll beyond the walls of the city, when he encounters Socrates, who will not let him go until he has delivered up the speech with which Lysias regaled him, or, better still, the manuscript, 'which I suspect you are carrying there in your left hand under your cloak.' So they bend their way beside Ilissus towards a tall plane tree, seen in the distance. Having reached it, they recline.

'By Hera,' says Socrates, 'a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents! This clearing, with the agnus castus in high bloom and fragrant, and the stream beneath the tree so gratefully cool to our feet! Judging from the ornaments and statues, I think this spot must be sacred to Acheloues and the Nymphs. And the breeze, how deliciously charged with balm! and all summer's murmur in the air, shrilled by the chorus of the grasshoppers! But the greatest charm is this knoll of turf,—positively a pillow for the head. My dear Phaedrus, you have been a delectable guide.'

'What an incomprehensible being you are, Socrates,' returns Phaedrus. 'When you are in the country, as you say, you really are like some stranger led about by a guide. Upon my word, I doubt if you ever stray beyond the gates save by accident.'

'Very true, my friend: and I hope you will forgive me for the reason—which is, that I love knowledge, and my teachers are the men who dwell in the city, not the trees or country scenes. Yet I do believe you have found a spell to draw me forth, like a hungry cow before whom a bough or a bunch of fruit is waved. For only hold up before me in like manner a book, and you may lead me all round Attica and over the wide world.'

So they recline and talk, looking aloft through that famous pure sky of Attica, mile upon mile transparent; and their discourse (preserved to us) is of Love, and seems to belong to that atmosphere, so clear it is and luminously profound. It ends with the cool of the day, and the two friends arise to depart. Socrates looks about him.

'Should we not, before going, offer up a prayer to these local deities?'

'By all means,' Phaedrus agrees.

Socrates (praying): 'Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, grant me beauty in the inward soul, and that the outward and inward may be at one! May I esteem the wise to be the rich; and may I myself have that quantity of gold which a temperate man, and he only, can carry.... Anything more? That prayer, I think, is enough for me.'

Phaedrus. 'Ask the same for me, Socrates. Friends, methinks, should have all things in common.'

Socrates. 'Amen, then.... Let us go.'

Here we have, as it seems to me, a marriage, without impediment, of wisdom and beauty between two minds that perforce have small acquaintance with books: and yet, with it, Socrates' confession that anyone with a book under his cloak could lead him anywhere by the nose. So we see that Hellenic culture at its best was independent of book-learning, and yet craved for it.

IV

When our own Literature awoke, taking its origin from the proud scholarship of the Renaissance, an Englishman who affected it was scarcely more cumbered with books than our Athenian had been, two thousand years before. It was, and it remained, aristocratic: sparingly expensive of its culture. It postulated, if not a slave population, at least a proletariat for which its blessings were not. No one thought of making a fortune by disseminating his work in print. Shakespeare never found it worth while to collect and publish his plays; and a very small sense of history will suffice to check our tears over the price received by Milton for "Paradise Lost." We may wonder, indeed, at the time it took our forefathers to realise—or, at any rate, to employ—the energy that lay in the printing-press. For centuries after its invention mere copying commanded far higher prices than authorship[1]. Writers gave 'authorised' editions to the world sometimes for the sake of fame, often to justify themselves against piratical publishers, seldom in expectation of monetary profit. Listen, for example, to Sir Thomas Browne's excuse for publishing "Religio Medici" (1643):

Had not almost every man suffered by the press or were not the tyranny thereof become universal, I had not wanted reason for complaint: but in times wherein I have lived to behold the highest perversion of that excellent invention, the name of his Majesty defamed, the honour of Parliament depraved, the writings of both depravedly, anticipatively, counterfeitly imprinted; complaints may seem ridiculous in private persons; and men of my condition may be as incapable of affronts, as hopeless of their reparations. And truly had not the duty I owe unto the importunity of friends, and the allegiance I must ever acknowledge unto truth, prevailed with me; the inactivity of my disposition might have made these sufferings continual, and time that brings other things to light, should have satisfied me in the remedy of its oblivion. But because things evidently false are not only printed, but many things of truth most falsely set forth, in this latter I could not but think myself engaged. For though we have no power to redress the former, yet in the other, the reparation being within our selves, I have at present represented unto the world a full and intended copy of that piece, which was most imperfectly and surreptitiously published before.

This I confess, about seven years past, with some others of affinity thereto, for my private exercise and satisfaction, I had at leisurable hours composed; which being communicated unto one, it became common unto many, and was by transcription successively corrupted, untill it arrived in a most depraved copy at the press ... [2]

V

The men of the 18th century maintained the old tradition of literary exclusiveness, but in a somewhat different way and more consciously.

I find, Gentlemen, when you read with me in private, that nine out of ten of you dislike the 18th century and all its literary works. As for the Women students, they one and all abominate it. You do not, I regret to say, provide me with reasons much more philosophical than the epigrammatist's for disliking Doctor Fell. May one whose time of life excuses perhaps a detachment from passion attempt to provide you with one? If so, first listen to this from Mr and Mrs Hammond's book "The Village Labourer," 1760-1832:

A row of 18th century houses, or a room of normal 18th century furniture, or a characteristic piece of 18th century literature, conveys at once a sensation of satisfaction and completeness. The secret of this charm is not to be found in any special beauty or nobility of design or expression, but simply in an exquisite fitness. The 18th century mind was a unity, an order. All literature and art that really belong to the 18th century are the language of a little society of men and women who moved within one set of ideas; who understood each other; who were not tormented by any anxious or bewildering problems; who lived in comfort, and, above all things, in composure. The classics were their freemasonry. There was a standard for the mind, for the emotions, for taste: there were no incongruities.

When you have a society like this, you have what we roughly call a civilisation, and it leaves its character and canons in all its surroundings and in its literature. Its definite ideas lend themselves readily to expression. A larger society seems an anarchy in contrast: just because of its escape into a greater world it seems powerless to stamp itself in wood or stone; it is condemned as an age of chaos and mutiny, with nothing to declare.

You do wrong, I assure you, in misprising these men of the 18th century. They reduced life, to be sure: but by that very means they saw it far more completely than do we, in this lyrical age, with our worship of 'fine excess.' Here at any rate, and to speak only of its literature, you have a society fencing that literature around—I do not say by forethought or even consciously—but in effect fencing its literature around, to keep it in control and capable of an orderly, a nice, even an exquisite cultivation. Dislike it as you may, I do not think that any of you, as he increases his knowledge of the technique of English Prose, yes, and of English Verse (I do not say of English Poetry) will deny his admiration to the men of the 18th century. The strength of good prose resides not so much in the swing and balance of the single sentence as in the marshalling of argument, the orderly procession of paragraphs, the disposition of parts so that each finds its telling, its proper, place; the adjustment of the means to the end; the strategy which brings its full force into action at the calculated moment and drives the conclusion home upon an accumulated sense of justice. I do not see how any student of 18th century literature can deny its writers—Berkeley or Hume or Gibbon—Congreve or Sheridan—Pope or Cowper—Addison or Steele or Johnson—Burke or Chatham or Thomas Paine—their meed for this, or, if he be an artist, even his homage.

But it remains true, as your instinct tells you, and as I have admitted, that they achieved all this by help of narrow and artificial boundaries. Of several fatal exclusions let me name but two.

In the first place, they excluded the Poor; imitating in a late age the Athenian tradition of a small polite society resting on a large and degraded one. Throughout the 18th century—and the great Whig families were at least as much to blame for this as the Tories—by enclosure of commons, by grants, by handling of the franchise, by taxation, by poor laws in result punitive though intended to be palliative, the English peasantry underwent a steady process of degradation into serfdom: into a serfdom which, during the first twenty years of the next century, hung constantly and precariously on the edge of actual starvation. The whole theory of culture worked upon a principle of double restriction; of restricting on the one hand the realm of polite knowledge to propositions suitable for a scholar and a gentleman, and, on the other, the numbers of the human family permitted to be either. The theory deprecated enthusiasm, as it discountenanced all ambition in a poor child to rise above what Sir Spencer Walpole called 'his inevitable and hereditary lot'—to soften which and make him acquiescent in it was, with a Wilberforce or a Hannah More, the last dream of restless benevolence.

VI

Also these 18th century men fenced off the whole of our own Middle English and medieval literature—fenced off Chaucer and Dunbar, Malory and Berners—as barbarous and 'Gothic.' They treated these writers with little more consideration than Boileau had thought it worth while to bestow on Villon or on Ronsard— enfin Malherbe! As for Anglo-Saxon literature, one may, safely say that, save by Gray and a very few others, its existence was barely surmised.

You may or may not find it harder to forgive them that they ruled out moreover a great part of the literature of the preceding century as offensive to urbane taste, or as they would say, 'disgusting.' They disliked it mainly, one suspects, as one age revolts from the fashion of another—as some of you, for example, revolt from the broad plenty of Dickens (Heaven forgive you) or the ornament of Tennyson. Some of the great writers of that age definitely excluded God from their scheme of things: others included God fiercely, but with circumscription and limitation. I think it fair to say of them generally that they hated alike the mystical and the mysterious, and, hating these, could have little commerce with such poetry as Crashaw's and Vaughan's or such speculation as gave ardour to the prose of the Cambridge Platonists. Johnson's famous attack, in his "Life of Cowley," upon the metaphysical followers of Donne ostensibly assails their literary conceits, but truly and at bottom rests its quarrel against an attitude of mind, in respect of which he lived far enough removed to be unsympathetic yet near enough to take denunciation for a duty. Johnson, to put it vulgarly, had as little use for Vaughan's notion of poetry as he would have had for Shelley's claim that it

feeds on the aereal kisses Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses,

and we have only to set ourselves back in Shelley's age and read (say) the verse of Frere and Canning in "The Anti-Jacobin," to understand how frantic a lyrist—let be how frantic a political figure—Shelley must have appeared to well-regulated minds.

VII

All this literature which our forefathers excluded has come back upon us: and concurrently we have to deal with the more serious difficulty (let us give thanks for it) of a multitude of millions insurgent to handsel their long-deferred heritage. I shall waste no time in arguing that we ought not to wish to withhold it, because we cannot if we would. And thus the problem becomes a double one, of distribution as well as of selection.

Now in the first place I submit that this distribution should be free: which implies that our selection must be confined to books and methods of teaching. There must be no picking and choosing among the recipients, no appropriation of certain forms of culture to certain 'stations of life' with a tendency, conscious or unconscious, to keep those stations as stationary as possible.

Merely by clearing our purpose to this extent we shall have made no inconsiderable advance. For even the last century never quite got rid of its predecessor's fixed idea that certain degrees of culture were appropriate to certain stations of life. With what gentle persistence it prevails, for example, in Jane Austen's novels; with what complacent rhetoric in Tennyson (and in spite of Lady Clara Vere de Vere)! Let me remind you that by allowing an idea to take hold of our animosity we may be as truly 'possessed' by it as though it claimed our allegiance. The notion that culture may be drilled to march in step with a trade or calling endured through the Victorian age of competition and possessed the mind not only of Samuel Smiles who taught by instances how a bright and industrious boy might earn money and lift himself out of his 'station,' but of Ruskin himself, who in the first half of "Sesame and Lilies," in the lecture "Of Kings' Treasuries," discussing the choice of books, starts vehemently and proceeds at length to denounce the prevalent passion for self-advancement—of rising above one's station in life—quite as if it were the most important thing, willy-nilly, in talking of the choice of books. Which means that, to Ruskin, just then, it was the most formidable obstacle. Can we, at this time of day, do better by simply turning the notion out of doors? Yes, I believe that we can: and upon this credo:

I believe that while it may grow—and grow infinitely—with increase of learning, the grace of a liberal education, like the grace of Christianity, is so catholic a thing—so absolutely above being trafficked, retailed, apportioned, among 'stations in life'—that the humblest child may claim it by indefeasible right, having a soul.

Further, I believe that Humanism is, or should he, no decorative appanage, purchased late in the process of education, within the means of a few: but a quality, rather, which should, and can, condition all teaching, from a child's first lesson in Reading: that its unmistakable hall-mark can be impressed upon the earliest task set in an Elementary School.

VIII

I am not preaching red Radicalism in this: I am not telling you that Jack is as good as his master: if he were, he would be a great deal better; for he would understand Homer (say) as well as his master, the child of parents who could afford to have him taught Greek. As Greek is commonly taught, I regret to say, whether they have learnt it or not makes a distressingly small difference to most boys' appreciation of Homer. Still it does make a vast difference to some, and should make a vast difference to all. And yet, if you will read the passage in Kinglake's "Eoethen" in which he tells—in words that find their echo in many a reader's memory—of his boyish passion for Homer—and if you will note that the boy imbibed his passion, after all, through the conduit of Pope's translation—you will acknowledge that, for the human boy, admission to much of the glory of Homer's realm does not depend upon such mastery as a boy of fifteen or sixteen possesses over the original. But let me quote you a few sentences:

I, too, loved Homer, but not with a scholar's love. The most humble and pious among women was yet so proud a mother that she could teach her first-born son no Watts's hymns, no collects for the day; she could teach him in earliest childhood no less than this—to find a home in his saddle, and to love old Homer, and all that old Homer sung. True it is, that the Greek was ingeniously rendered into English, the English of Pope even, but not even a mesh like that can screen an earnest child from the fire of Homer's battles.

I pored over the "Odyssey" as over a story-book, hoping and fearing for the hero whom yet I partly scorned. But the "Iliad"—line by line I clasped it to my brain with reverence as well as with love....

The impatient child is not grubbing for beauties, but pushing the siege; the women vex him with their delays, and their talking ... but all the while that he thus chafes at the pausing of the action, the strong vertical light of Homer's poetry is blazing so full upon the people and things of the "Iliad," that soon to the eyes of the child they grow familiar as his mother's shawl....

It was not the recollection of school nor college learning, but the rapturous and earnest reading of my childhood, which made me bend forward so longingly to the plains of Troy.

IX

It is among the books then, and not among the readers, that we must do our selecting. But how? On what principle or principles?

Sometime in the days of my youth, a newspaper, "The Pall Mall Gazette," then conducted by W. T. Stead, made a conscientious effort to solve the riddle by inviting a number of eminent men to compile lists of the Hundred Best Books. Now this invitation rested on a fallacy. Considering for a moment how personal a thing is Literature, you will promptly assure yourselves that there is—there can be—no such thing as the Hundred Best Books. If you yet incline to toy with the notion, carry it on and compile a list of the Hundred Second-best Books: nay, if you will, continue until you find yourself solemnly, with a brow corrugated by responsibility, weighing the claims (say) of Velleius Paterculus, Paul and Virginia and Mr Jorrocks to admission among the Hundred Tenth-best Books. There is, in fact no positive hierarchy among the classics. You cannot appraise the worth of Charles Lamb against the worth of Casaubon: the worth of Hesiod against the worth of Madame de Sevigne: the worth of Theophile Gautier against the worth of Dante or Thomas Hobbes or Macchiavelli or Jane Austen. They all wrote with pens, in ink, upon paper: but you no sooner pass beyond these resemblances than your comparison finds itself working in impari materia.

Also why should the Best Books be 100 in number, rather than 99 or 199? And under what conditions is a book a Best Book? There are moods in which we not only prefer Pickwick to the Rig-Vedas or Sakuntala, but find that it does us more good. In our day again I pay all respect to Messrs Dent's "Everyman's Library." It was a large conception vigorously planned. But, in the nature of things, Everyman is going to arrive at a point beyond which he will find it more and more difficult to recognise himself: at a point, let us say, when Everyman, opening a new parcel, starts to doubt if, after all, it wouldn't be money in his pocket to be Somebody Else.

X

And yet, may be, "The Pall Mall Gazette" was on the right scent. For it was in search of masterpieces: and, however we teach, our trust will in the end repose upon masterpieces, upon the great classics of whatever Language or Literature we are handling: and these, in any language are neither enormous in number and mass, nor extraordinarily difficult to detect, nor (best of all) forbidding to the reader by reason of their own difficulty. Upon a selected few of these—even upon three, or two, or one—we may teach at least a surmise of the true delight, and may be some measure of taste whereby our pupil will, by an inner guide, be warned to choose the better and reject the worse when we turn him loose to read for himself.

To this use of masterpieces I shall devote my final lecture.



[Footnote 1: Charles Reade notes this in "The Cloister and the Hearth," chap. LXI.]

[Footnote 2: The loose and tautologous style of this Preface is worth noting. Likely enough Browne wrote it in a passion that deprived him of his habitual self-command. One phrase alone reveals the true Browne—that is, Browne true to himself: 'and time that brings other things to light, should have satisfied me in the remedy of its oblivion.']



LECTURE XII

ON THE USE OF MASTERPIECES

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 1918

I

I do not think, Gentlemen, that we need to bother ourselves today with any definition of a 'classic,' or of the stigmata by which a true classic can be recognised. Sainte-Beuve once indicated these in a famous discourse, "Qu'est-ce qu'un classique": and it may suffice us that these include Universality and Permanence. Your true classic is universal, in that it appeals to the catholic mind of man. It is doubly permanent: for it remains significant, or acquires a new significance, after the age for which it was written and the conditions under which it was written, have passed away; and it yet keeps, undefaced by handling, the original noble imprint of the mind that first minted it—or shall we say that, as generation after generation rings the coin, it ever returns the echo of its father-spirit?

But for our purpose it suffices that in our literature we possess a number of works to which the title of classic cannot be refused. So let us confine ourselves to these, and to the question, How to use them?

II

Well, to begin with, I revert to a point which I tried to establish in my first lecture; and insist with all my strength that the first obligation we owe to any classic, and to those whom we teach, and to ourselves, is to treat it absolutely: not for any secondary or derivative purpose, or purpose recommended as useful by any manual: but at first solely to interpret the meaning which its author intended: that in short we should trust any given masterpiece for its operation, on ourselves and on others. In that first lecture I quoted to you this most wise sentence:

That all spirit is mutually attractive, as all matter is mutually attractive, is an ultimate fact,

and consenting to this with all my heart I say that it matters very little for the moment, or even for a considerable while, that a pupil does not perfectly, or even nearly, understand all he reads, provided we can get the attraction to seize upon him. He and the author between them will do the rest: our function is to communicate and trust. In what other way do children take the ineffaceable stamp of a gentle nurture than by daily attraction to whatsoever is beautiful and amiable and dignified in their home? As there, so in their reading, the process must be gradual of acquiring an inbred monitor to reject the evil and choose the good. For it is the property of masterpieces that they not only raise you to

despise low joys, low Gains; Disdain whatever Cornbury disdains:

they are not only as Lamb wrote of the Plays of Shakespeare 'enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach you courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity'; but they raise your gorge to defend you from swallowing the fifth-rate, the sham, the fraudulent. Abeunt studia in mores. I cannot, for my part, conceive a man who has once incorporated the "Phaedo" or the "Paradiso" or "Lear" in himself as lending himself for a moment to one or other of the follies plastered in these late stern times upon the firm and most solid purpose of this nation—the inanities, let us say, of a Baby-Week. Or, for a more damnable instance, I think of you and me with Marvell's great Horatian Ode sunk in our minds, standing to-day by the statue of Charles I that looks down Whitehall: telling ourselves of 'that memorable scene' before the Banqueting House, remembering amid old woes all the glory of our blood and state, recollecting what is due even to ourselves, standing on the greatest site of our capital, and turning to see it degraded, as it has been for a week, to a vulgar raree-show. Gentlemen, I could read you many poor ill-written letters from mothers whose sons have died for England, to prove to you we have not deserved that, or the sort of placard with which London has been plastered,

Dum domus AEneae Capitoli immobile saxum Accolet.

Great enterprises (as we know) and little minds go ill together. Someone veiled the statue. That, at least, was well done.

I have not the information—nor do I want it—to make even a guess who was responsible for this particular outrage. I know the sort of man well enough to venture that he never had a liberal education, and, further, that he is probably rather proud of it. But he may nevertheless own some instinct of primitive kindliness: and I wish he could know how he afflicts men of sensitiveness who have sons at the War.

III

Secondly, let us consider what use we can make of even one selected classic. I refer you back to the work of an old schoolmaster, quoted in my first lecture:

I believe, if the truth were known, men would be astonished at the small amount of learning with which a high degree of culture is compatible. In a moment of enthusiasm I ventured once to tell my 'English set' that if they could really master the ninth book of "Paradise Lost," so as to rise to the height of its great argument and incorporate all its beauties in themselves, they would at one blow, by virtue of that alone, become highly cultivated men.... More and more various learning might raise them to the same height by different paths, but could hardly raise them higher.

I beg your attention for the exact words: 'to rise to the height of its great argument and incorporate all its beauties in themselves.' There you have it—'to incorporate.' Do you remember that saying of Wordsworth's, casually dropped in conversation, but preserved for us by Hazlitt?—'It is in the highest degree unphilosophic to call language or diction the dress of our thoughts.... It is the incarnation of our thoughts.' Even so, I maintain to you, the first business of a learner in literature is to get complete hold of some undeniable masterpiece and incorporate it, incarnate it. And, I repeat, there are a few great works for you to choose from: works approved for you by ancient and catholic judgment.

IV

But let us take something far simpler than the Ninth Book of "Paradise Lost" and more direct than any translated masterpiece can be in its appeal; something of high genius, written in our mother tongue. Let us take "The Tempest."

Of "The Tempest" we may say confidently:

(1) that it is a literary masterpiece: the last most perfect 'fruit of the noblest tree in our English Forest';

(2) that its story is quite simple; intelligible to a child: (its basis in fact is fairy-tale, pure and simple—as I tried to show in a previous lecture);

(3) that in reading it—or in reading "Hamlet," for that matter— the child has no sense at all of being patronised, of being 'written down to.' And this has the strongest bearing on my argument. The great authors, as Emerson says, never condescend. Shakespeare himself speaks to a slip of a boy, and that boy feels that he is Ferdinand;

(4) that, though Shakespeare uses his loftiest, most accomplished and, in a sense, his most difficult language: a way of talking it has cost him a life-time to acquire, in line upon line inviting the scholar's, prosodist's, poet's most careful study; that language is no bar to the child's enjoyment: but rather casts about the whole play an aura of magnificence which, with the assistant harmonies, doubles and redoubles the spell. A child no more resents this because it is strange than he objects to read in a fairytale of robbers concealed in oil-jars or of diamonds big as a roc's egg. When will our educators see that what a child depends on is imagination, that what he demands of life is the wonderful, the glittering, possibility?

Now if, putting all this together and taking confidence from it, we boldly launch a child upon "The Tempest" we shall come sooner or later upon passages that we have arrived at finding difficult. We shall come, for example, to the Masque of Iris, which Iris, invoking Ceres, thus opens:

Ceres, most bounteous lady, thy rich leas Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats and pease; Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep, And flat meads thatched with stover, them to keep: Thy banks with pioned and twilled brims, Which spongy April at thy hest betrims— To make cold nymphs chaste crowns; and thy broom-groves, Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves, Being lass-lorn; thy pole-clipt vineyard; And thy sea-marge, sterile and rocky hard, Where thou thyself dost air—the Queen o' th' sky, Whose watry arch and messenger am I, Bids thee leave these....

The passage is undeniably hard for any child, even when you have paused to explain who Ceres is, who Iris, who the Queen o' the sky, and what Iris means by calling herself 'her watery arch and messenger.' The grammatical structure not only stands on its head but maintains that posture for an extravagant while. Naturally (or rather let us say, ordinarily) it would run, 'Ceres, the Queen o' the sky bids thee leave—thy rich leas, etc.' But, the lines being twelve-and-a-half in number, we get no hint of there being any grammatical subject until it bursts on us in the second half of line eleven, while the two main verbs and the object of one of them yet linger to be exploded in the last half-line, 'Bids thee leave these.' And this again is as nothing to the difficulties of interpretation. 'Dismissed bachelor' may be easy; 'pole-clipt vineyard' is certainly not, at first sight. 'To make cold nymphs chaste crowns.' What cold nymphs? You have to wait for another fifty odd lines before being quite sure that Shakespeare means Naiads (and 'What are Naiads?' says the child) —'temperate nymphs':

You nymphs, called Naiads, of the windring brooks, With your sedged crowns...

—and if the child demand what is meant by 'pioned and twilled brims,' you have to answer him that nobody knows.

These difficulties—perhaps for you, certainly for the young reader or listener—are reserved delights. My old schoolmaster even indulges this suspicion—'I never can persuade myself that Shakespeare would have passed high in a Civil Service Examination on one of his own plays.' At any rate you don't begin with these difficulties: you don't (or I hope you don't) read the notes first: since, as Bacon puts it, 'Studies teach not their own use.'

As for the child, he is not 'grubbing for beauties'; he magnificently ignores what he cannot for the moment understand, being intent on What Is, the heart and secret of the adventure. He is Ferdinand (I repeat) and the isle is 'full of voices.' If these voices were all intelligible, why then, as Browning would say, 'the less Island it.'

V

I have purposely exhibited "The Tempest" at its least tractable. Who will deny that as a whole it can be made intelligible even to very young children by the simple process of reading it with them intelligently? or that the mysteries such a reading leaves unexplained are of the sort to fascinate a child's mind and allure it? But if this be granted, I have established my contention that the Humanities should not be treated as a mere crown and ornament of education; that they should inform every part of it, from the beginning, in every school of the realm: that whether a child have more education or less education, what he has can be, and should be, a 'liberal education' throughout.

Matthew Arnold, as every one knows, used to preach the use of these masterpieces as prophylactics of taste. I would I could make you feel that they are even more necessary to us.

The reason why?—The reason is that every child born in these Islands is born into a democracy which, apart from home affairs, stands committed to a high responsibility for the future welfare and good governance of Europe. For three centuries or so it has held rule over vast stretches of the earth's surface and many millions of strange peoples: while its obligations towards the general civilisation of Europe, if not intermittent, have been tightened or relaxed, now here, now there, by policy, by commerce, by dynastic alliances, by sudden revulsions or sympathies. But this War will leave us bound to Europe as we never have been: and, whether we like it or not, no less inextricably bound to foe than to friend. Therefore, I say, it has become important, and in a far higher degree than it ever was before the War, that our countrymen grow up with a sense of what I may call the soul of Europe. And nowhere but in literature (which is 'memorable speech')—or at any rate, nowhere so well as in literature—can they find this sense.

VI

There was, as we have seen, a time in Europe, extending over many centuries, when mankind dwelt under the preoccupation of making literature, and still making more of it. The 5th century B.C. in Athens was such a time; and if you will you may envy, as we all admire, the men of an age when to write at all was tantamount to asserting genius; the men who, in Newman's words, 'deserve to be Classics, both because of what they do and because they can do it.' If you envy—while you envy—at least remember that these things often paid their price; that the "Phaedo," for example, was bought for us by the death of Socrates. Pass Athens and come to Alexandria: still men are accumulating books and the material for books; threshing out the Classics into commentaries and grammars, garnering books in great libraries.

There follows an age which interrupts this hive-like labour with sudden and insensate destruction. German tribes from the north, Turkish from the east, break in upon the granaries and send up literature in flames; the Christian Fathers from Tertullian to Gregory the Great (I regret to say) either heartily assisting or at least warming their benedictory hands at the blaze: and so thoroughly they do their work that even the writings of Aristotle, the Philosopher, must wait for centuries as 'things silently gone out of mind or things violently destroyed' (to borrow Wordsworth's fine phrase) and creep back into Europe bit by bit, under cover of Arabic translations.

The scholars set to work and begin rebuilding: patient, indefatigable, anonymous as the coral insects at work on a Pacific atoll-building, building, until on the near side of the gulf we call the Dark Age, islets of scholarship lift themselves above the waters: mere specks at first, but ridges appear and connect them: and, to first seeming, sterile enough:

Nec Cereri opportuna seges, nec commoda Baccho—

but as they join and become a terra firma, a thin soil gathers on them God knows whence: and, God knows whence, the seed is brought, 'it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain.' There is a price, again, for this resurrection: but how nobly, how blithely paid you may learn, without seeking recondite examples, from Cuthbert's famous letter describing the death of Bede. Compare that story with that of the last conversation of Socrates; and you will surely recognise that the two men are brothers born out of time; that Bede's work has been a legacy; that his life has been given to recreating—not scholarship merely nor literature merely—but, through them both, something above them both—the soul of Europe. And this may or may not lead you on to reflect that beyond our present passions, and beyond this War, in a common sanity Europe (and America with her) will have to discover that common soul again.

But eminent spirits such as Bede's are, by their very eminence, less representative of the process—essentially fugitive and self-abnegatory—than the thousands of copyists who have left no name behind them. Let me read you a short paragraph from "The Cambridge History of English Literature," Chapter 11, written, the other day, by one of our own teachers:

The cloister was the centre of life in the monastery, and in the cloister was the workshop of the patient scribe. It is hard to realise that the fair and seemly handwriting of these manuscripts was executed by fingers which, on winter days, when the wind howled through the cloisters, must have been numbed by icy cold. It is true that, occasionally, little carrels or studies in the recesses of the windows were screened off from the main walk of the cloister, and, sometimes, a small room or cell would be partitioned off for the use of a single scribe. The room would then be called the Scriptorium, but it is unlikely that any save the oldest and most learned of the community were afforded this luxury. In these scriptoria of various kinds the earliest annals and chronicles in the English language were penned, in the beautiful and painstaking forms in which we know them.

If you seek testimony, here are the ipsissima verba of a poor monk of Wessobrunn endorsed upon his MS:

The book which you now see was written in the outer seats of the cloister. While I wrote I froze: and what I could not write by the beams of day I finished by candlelight.

We might profitably spend—but to-day cannot spare—a while upon the pains these men of the Middle Ages took to accumulate books and to keep them. The chained volumes in old libraries, for example, might give us a text for this as well as start us speculating why it is that, to this day, the human conscience incurably declines to include books with other portable property covered by the Eighth Commandment. Or we might follow several of the early scholars and humanists in their passionate chasings across Europe, in and out of obscure monasteries, to recover the lost MSS of the classics: might tell, for instance, of Pope Nicholas V, whose birth-name was Tommaso Parentucelli, and how he rescued the MSS from Constantinople and founded the Vatican Library: or of Aurispa of Sicily who collected two hundred and thirty-eight for Florence: or the story of the editio princeps of the Greek text of Homer. Or we might dwell on the awaking of our literature, and the trend given to it, by men of the Italian and French renaissance; or on the residence of Erasmus here, in this University, with its results.

VII

But I have said enough to make it clear that, as we owe so much of our best to understanding Europe, so the need to understand Europe lies urgently to-day upon large classes in this country; and that yet, in the nature of things, these classes can never enjoy such leisure as our forefathers enjoyed to understand what I call the soul of Europe, or at least to misunderstand it upon acquaintance.

Let me point out further that within the last few months we have doubled the difficulty at a stroke by sharing the government of our country with women and admitting them to Parliament. It beseems a great nation to take great risks: to dare them is at once a sign and a property of greatness: and for good or ill—but for limitless good as we trust—our country has quietly made this enterprise amid the preoccupations of the greatest War in its annals. Look at it as you will—let other generations judge it as they will—it stands a monument of our faith in free self-government that in these most perilous days we gave and took so high a guerdon of trust in one another.

But clearly it implies that all the women of this country, down to the small girls entering our elementary schools, must be taught a great many things their mothers and grandmothers—happy in their generation—were content not to know[1].

It cannot be denied, I think, that in the long course of this War, now happily on the point of a victorious conclusion, we have suffered heavily through past neglect and present nescience of our literature, which is so much more European, so much more catholic, a thing than either our politics or our national religion: that largely by reason of this neglect and this nescience our statesmen have again and again failed to foresee how continental nations would act through failing to understand their minds; and have almost invariably, through this lack of sympathetic understanding, failed to interpret us to foreign friend or foe, even when (and it was not often) they interpreted us to ourselves. I note that America—a country with no comparable separate tradition of literature—has customarily chosen men distinguished by the grace of letters for ambassadors to the Court of St James—Motley, Lowell, Hay, Page, in our time: and has for her President a man of letters—and a Professor at that!—whereas, even in these critical days, Great Britain, having a most noble cause and at least half-a-hundred writers and speakers capable of presenting it with dignity and so clearly that no neutral nation could mistake its logic, has by preference entrusted it to stunt journalists and film-artistes. If in these later days you have lacked a voice to interpret you in the great accent of a Chatham, the cause lies in past indifference to that literary tradition which is by no means the least among the glories of our birth and state.

VIII

Masterpieces, then, will serve us as prophylactics of taste, even from childhood; and will help us, further, to interpret the common mind of civilisation. But they have a third and yet nobler use. They teach us to lift our own souls.

For witness to this and to the way of it I am going to call an old writer for whom, be it whim or not, I have an almost 18th century reverence—Longinus. No one exactly knows who he was; although it is usual to identify him with that Longinus who philosophised in the court of the Queen Zenobia and was by her, in her downfall, handed over with her other counsellors to be executed by Aurelian: though again, as is usual, certain bold bad men affirm that, whether he was this Longinus or not, the treatise of which I speak was not written by any Longinus at all but by someone with a different name, with which they are unacquainted. Be this as it may, somebody wrote the treatise and its first editor, Francis Robertello of Basle, in 1554 called him Dionysius Longinus; and so shall I, and have done with it, careless that other MSS than that used by Robertello speak of Dionysius or Longinus. Dionysius Longinus, then, in the 3rd century A.D.—some say in the 1st: it is no great matter—wrote a little book [Greek: PERI UPSOUS] commonly cited as "Longinus on the Sublime." The title is handy, but quite misleading, unless you remember that by 'Sublimity' Longinus meant, as he expressly defines it, 'a certain distinction and excellence in speech.' The book, thus recovered, had great authority with critics of the 17th and 18th centuries. For the last hundred years it has quite undeservedly gone out of vogue.

It is (I admit) a puzzling book, though quite clear in argument and language: pellucidly clear, but here and there strangely modern, even hauntingly modern, if the phrase may be allowed. You find yourself rubbing your eyes over a passage more like Matthew Arnold than something of the 3rd century: or you come without warning on a few lines of 'comparative criticism,' as we call it —an illustration from Genesis—'God said, Let there be Light, and there was Light' used for a specimen of the exalted way of saying things. Generally, you have a sense that this author's lineage is mysterious after the fashion of Melchisedek's.

Well, to our point—Longinus finds that the conditions of lofty utterance are five: of which the first is by far the most important. And this foremost condition is innate: you either have it or you have not. Here it is:

'Elsewhere,' says Longinus, 'I have written as follows: "Sublimity is the echo of a great soul." Hence even a bare idea sometimes, by itself and without a spoken word will excite admiration, just because of the greatness of soul implied. Thus the silence of Ajax in the underworld is great and more sublime than words.'

You remember the passage, how Odysseus meets that great spirit among the shades and would placate it, would 'make up' their quarrel on earth now, with carneying words:

'Ajax, son of noble Telamon, wilt thou not then, even in death forget thine anger against me over that cursed armour.... Nay, there is none other to blame but Zeus: he laid thy doom on thee. Nay, come hither, O my lord, and hear me and master thine indignation:

So I spake, but he answered me not a word, but strode from me into the Darkness, following the others of the dead that be departed.

Longinus goes on:

It is by all means necessary to point this out—that the truly eloquent must be free from base and ignoble (or ill-bred) thoughts. For it is not possible that men who live their lives with mean and servile aims and ideas should produce what is admirable and worthy of immortality. Great accents we expect to fall from the lips of those whose thoughts are dignified.

Believe this and it surely follows, as concave implies convex, that by daily converse and association with these great ones we take their breeding, their manners, earn their magnanimity, make ours their gifts of courtesy, unselfishness, mansuetude, high seated pride, scorn of pettiness, wholesome plentiful jovial laughter.

He that of such a height hath built his mind, And rear'd the dwelling of his soul so strong As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame Of his resolved powers, nor all the wind Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong His settled peace, or to disturb the same; What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey!

And with how free an eye doth he look down Upon these lower regions of turmoil! Where all the storms of passions mainly beat On flesh and blood; where honour, power, renown, Are only gay afflictions, golden toil; Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet As frailty doth; and only great doth seem To little minds, who do it so esteem....

Knowing the heart of man is set to be The centre of this world, about the which These revolutions of disturbances Still roll; where all th' aspects of misery Predominate; whose strong effects are such As he must bear, being powerless to redress; And that, unless above himself he can Erect himself, how poor a thing is man![2]

IX

If the exhortation of these verses be somewhat too high and stoical for you, let me return to Longinus and read you, from his concluding chapter, a passage you may find not inapposite to these times, nor without a moral:

'It remains' [he says] 'to clear up, my dear Terentianus, a question which a certain philosopher has recently mooted. I wonder,' he says, 'as no doubt do many others, how it happens that in our time there are men who have the gift of persuasion to the utmost extent, and are well fitted for public life, and are keen and ready, and particularly rich in all the charms of language, yet there no longer arise really lofty and transcendent natures unless it be quite peradventure. So great and world-wide a dearth of high utterance attends our age. Can it be,' he continued, 'we are to accept the common cant that democracy is the nursing mother of genius, and that great men of letters flourish and die with it? For freedom, they say, has the power to cherish and encourage magnanimous minds, and with it is disseminated eager mutual rivalry and the emulous thirst to excel. Moreover, by the prizes open under a popular government, the mental faculties of orators are perpetually practised and whetted, and as it were, rubbed bright, so that they shine free as the state itself. Whereas to-day,' he went on, 'we seem to have learnt as an infant-lesson that servitude is the law of life; being all wrapped, while our thoughts are yet young and tender, in observances and customs as in swaddling clothes, bound without access to that fairest and most fertile source of man's speech (I mean Freedom) so that we are turned out in no other guise than that of servile flatterers. And servitude (it has been well said) though it be even righteous, is the cage of the soul and a public prison-house.'

But I answered him thus.—'It is easy, my good sir, and characteristic of human nature, to gird at the age in which one lives. Yet consider whether it may not be true that it is less the world's peace that ruins noble nature than this war illimitable which holds our aspirations in its fist, and occupies our age with passions as with troops that utterly plunder and harry it. The love of money and the love of pleasure enslave us, or rather, as one may say, drown us body and soul in their depths. For vast and unchecked wealth marches with lust of pleasure for comrade, and when one opens the gate of house or city, the other at once enters and abides. And in time these two build nests in the hearts of men, and quickly rear a progeny only too legitimate: and the ruin within the man is gradually consummated as the sublimities of his soul wither away and fade, and in ecstatic contemplation of our mortal parts we omit to exalt, and come to neglect in nonchalance, that within us which is immortal.'

I had a friend once who, being in doubt with what picture to decorate the chimney-piece in his library, cast away choice and wrote up two Greek words—[Greek: PSYCHES 'IATREION]; that is, the hospital—the healing-place—of the soul.



[Footnote 1: 'Well! ... my education is at last finished: indeed it would be strange, if, after five years' hard application, anything were left incomplete. Happily that is all over now; and I have nothing to do, but to exercise my various accomplishments.

'Let me see!—as to French, I am mistress of that, and speak it, if possible, with more fluency than English. Italian I can read with ease, and pronounce very well: as well at least, and better, than any of my friends; and that is all one need wish for in Italian. Music I have learned till I am perfectly sick of it. But ... it will be delightful to play when we have company. I must still continue to practise a little;—the only thing, I think, that I need now to improve myself in. And then there are my Italian songs! which everybody allows I sing with taste, and as it is what so few people can pretend to, I am particularly glad that I can.

'My drawings are universally admired; especially the shells and flowers; which are beautiful, certainly; besides this, I have a decided taste in all kinds of fancy ornaments.

'And then my dancing and waltzing! in which our master himself owned that he could take me no further! just the figure for it certainly; it would be unpardonable if I did not excel.

'As to common things, geography, and history, and poetry, and philosophy, thank my stars, I have got through them all! so that I may consider myself not only perfectly accomplished, but also thoroughly well-informed.

'Well, to be sure, how much have I fagged through—; the only wonder is that one head can contain it all.'

I found this in a little book "Thoughts of Divines and Philosophers," selected by Basil Montagu. The quotation is signed 'J. T.' I cannot trace it, but suspect Jane Taylor.]

[Footnote 2: Samuel Daniel, "Epistle to the Lady Margaret, Countess of Cumberland."]



INDEX

"Acts of the Apostles, The," 165 Addison, Joseph, 146, 192 "Adonais," Shelley's, 79 Adrian VI, Pope, 77 Aeschylus, 1, 121, 179, 183 "Aesop and Rhodope," Landor's 117 "Agamemnon, The," 79 "Aims of Literary Study, The," 6 "Allegro,L'," 62, 63, 64 Ameipsias, 21 "Anatomy of Melancholy," Burton's, 155 "Ancient Mariner, The," 59 Andersen, Hans Christian, 46 "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The," 154 "Annual Register, The," 155 "Anti-Jacobin, The," 194 "Apologia," Newman's, 155 "Arabian Nights," M. Galland's, 43 "Arabian Nights, The," 139 Arber, 99 Aristophanes, 21, 147 Aristotle, 1, 25, 48, 51, 52, 58, 59, 60, 121, 129, 148, 150, 174, 207 Arnold, Matthew, 38, 99, 104, 124, 153, 205, 213 "Arraignment of Paris," Peele's, 80 "As You Like It," 71 Aulnoy, Madame D', 43 Aurispa, 209 Austen, Jane, 102, 194, 197

Bacon, Francis 21, 22, 23, 73, 94, 114, 126, 155, 205 Bagehot, Walter, 36, 113 Bailey, Philip James, 155 Baker, Sir William, 170 "Balder Dead" 163 Ballad. The, 55 Barboar, John, 155 Bede, 207. 209 Beethoven, 139 "Beginnings of Poetry," Dr Gummere's, 55, 56, 58 "Beowulf,". 99 Berkeley, George, 191 Berners, 193 "Bible, The," 97, 126 et seq. "Bible, The Geneva," 155 "Blackwood's Magazine," 80 Blair, Robert, 155 Blake, William, 33, 155 Boileau, 193 Bologna, University of, 73 "Book of Nonsense," Lear's, 111 Boswell, James, 93, 155 Bottomley, Horatio, 185 Brady, Nicholas, 170 Brooke, Stopford, 94 Brown, Dr John, 56 Browne, Sir Thomas, 145, 185, 189, 190 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 72 Browning, Robert, 5, 6, 7, 15, 152, 155, 205 "Bruce, The," Barbour's, 155 Bunyan, John, 97, 134, 135, 145, 152 Burke, Edmund, 94, 104, 116, 155, 192 Burns, Robert, 97, 132, 133 Burton, Robert, 155 Butcher, Professor, 129 Byron, Lord, 5, 80, 168

"Cabinet des Fees, Le," 43 "Cambridge Essays on Education," Inge's essay in, 112 "Cambridge History of English Literature, The," 5, 152, 208 Cambridge Platonists, The, 29, 193 Cambridge, University of, 1, 2 et seq., 57, 76, 77, 87, 88, 105, 121, 209 Campbell, John, 155 Canning, 193 "Canterbury Tales, The," 71, 161 "Canterbury Tales, The Prologue to the," 71, 94, 144, 161 Canton, William, 38 Carlyle, Thomas, 5, 38, 106 Casaubon, 70, 197 "Centuries of Meditations," Thomas Traherne's, 44 Chatham, Earl of, 115, 116, 192, 211 Chaucer, 4, 27, 65, 66, 71, 88, 94, 102, 164, 105, 124, 144, 164, 193 Chicago, University of, 154 "Choephori," 175 "Chronicles, Book of," 138 Clarendon, Lord, 155 Clark, William George, 94, 99 "Cloister and the Hearth, The," Charles Reade's, 189 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 65 Collins, William, 124 Colvin, Sir Sidney, 86 "Complaint of Deor, The," 155 Comte, Auguste, 51 Congreve, William, 192 "Corinna, from Athens, to Tanagra," Landor's, 124, 125 "Corinthians, St Paul's First Epistle to the," 81, 82 Corson, Dr, 6, 66, 100 Cory, William (Johnson), 123 "Cotter's Saturday Night, The," Burns's, 132, 139 Coverdale, Miles, 97,145, 158 Cowper, William, 100, 115, 192 Cranmer, Thomas, 97 Crashaw, Richard, 193 Cuthbert, 207 "Cyrano de Bergerac," 111

Daniel, Samuel, 215 Dante, 27, 79, 104, 153, 164. 197 Darwin, Charles, 154 Davenant, Sir William, 151 "Death in the Desert, A," Browning's, 6, 7 "Descent of Man," Darwin's, 154 "Deserted Village, The," 155 Dickens, Charles, 5, 193 Dionysius, 212 "Divina Commedia," 52 "Doctor's Tale, The," 71 "Dolores," Swinburne's, 155 "Domesday Book," 155 "Don Quixote," 105 Donne, John, 82, 89, 105, 114, 155, 193 "Dream of Boccaccio," Landor's, 82 Dryden, John, 54 Dublin, University of, 131 Dunbar, William, 193 "Dutch Republic," Motley's, 82

Earle, John, 44, 49 "Ecclesiastes," 161 "Ecclesiastical Polity," Richard Hooker's, 155 "Ecclesiasticus" 144 Education, 35 et seq. Ehrenreich, Dr Paul, 55 "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," Gray's, 61, 144, 164 Eliot, George, 14 Ellis, A. J., 99 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 11 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 33, 203 "Eoethen," Kinglake's, 196 "Epipsychidion," Shelley's, 89 "Epistle to the Lady Margaret, Countess of Cumberland," Samuel Daniel's, 214, 215 Erasmus, 121, 209 "Erster Schulgang," 39 "Esmond," Thackeray's, 82, 83 "Essay on Comedy," Meredith's, 110 "Essay on Man," Pope's, 144 "Essays," Bacon's, 94, 155 "Esther," 161 "Ethics," Aristotle's, 1 Euclid, 93, 131 Euripides, 19, 21, 123, 157 "Everyman," 176 "Everyman's Library," 198 Ezekiel, 161

"Faerie Queene, The," 155 "Fairchild Family, The," 40 "Festus," Bailey's, 155 "Fetch a pail of water," 53 Fitzgerald, Edward, 118, 122, 155 Fort, Paul, 174 Fowler, F. G., 108 Fowler, H. W., 108 Franklin, Benjamin, 90 Frere, J. H., 193 "Friar's Tale, The," 71 "Friendship's Garland," Matthew Arnold's, 38 Froissart, 155 Furnivall, 99

Galileo, 27 Galland, M., 43 "Gammer Grethel," 43 Gautier, Theophile, 197 "Genesis, Book of," 213 "Geneva Bible, The," 155 Gibbon, Edward, 20, 21, 121, 131, 146, 149, 192 "Golden Treasury," Palgrave's, 155 Goldsmith, Oliver, 102, 105 "Gondibert," Sir William Davenant's, 151 "Grammarian's Funeral, A," Browning's, 15 Grave, Robert Blair's, 155 Gray, Thomas, 61, 144, 164 Gregory the Great, 207 Grimm, the brothers, 43 Grocyn, 121 Grosart, Alexander Balloch, 99 Gummere, Dr, 55, 56, 58

Hakluyt, Richard, 155 Hales, Dr, 99 Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 3, 41 11, 23, 24 "Hamlet," 71, 127, 144, 161, 163, 203 Hammond, Mr, 190 Hammond, Mrs, 190 Hay, 211 Hazlitt, William, 202 Hegel, 25, 26 Heidelberg, University of, 76 "Here Come Three Dukes a riding," 53 "Here we go Gathering Nuts in May," 53 Herodotus, 123 Hesiod, 197 Hobbes, Thomas, 197 Holmes, Mr, 47, 50, 51, 52 Homer, 83, 118, 146 147, 148, 149, 153, 164, 167, 195, 196 Hooker, Richard, 155 Hopkins, John, 170 Horace, 1 "Hound of Heaven, The," Thompson's, 155 "Household Tales," the Grimms; 43 Hugo, Victor, 164 Hume, David, 192 "Hymns Ancient and Modern," 170

"Idea of a University, The," Newman's, 114 "Iliad, The," 99, 147, 148 "Imitatione Christi, De," 138 "In Memoriam," Tennyson's, 58 Inge, Dean, 112 "Intellectual Life, The," Hamerton's, 3, 4, 23, 24 "Intimations of Immortality," Wordsworth's, 44 "Invisible Playmate, The," William Canton's, 38 "Irish R.M., The Adventures of an," Somerville's and Ross's, 135 Irwin, Sidney, 121 Isaiah, 138, 153, 156, 161 "Isaiah, Book of," 138, 144, 153, 161 "Isthmian Odes," Pindar's, 98

Jansen, 77, Jenkinson, Mr, 184, 185 Job, 166, 167, 168, 175 et seq. "Job, Book of," 139, 144, 161 et seq. "John Bull," Bottomley's, 185 John, St, of Patmos, 7, 130, 151 Johnson, Samuel, 61, 89, 93, 105, 131, 146, 192, 193 Jonson, Ben, 102 "Joshua, Book of," 47, 136, 137 Joubert, 117 Jowett, Benjamin, 186 Jusserand, J. J., 104

Keats, John, 84, 85, 87 Keble, John, 114 "King Henry IV," Part I, 71 "King John," 71 "King Lear," 16, 71, 163, 201 Kinglake, Alexander William, 196 "Kings, Book of," 138, 139, 141 "Kings' Treasuries, Of," Ruskin's, 195 "Knight's Tale, The," 71

Lamb, Charles, 102, 106, 156, 197, 200 Landor, Walter Savage, 82, 117, 124, 130 Latymer, Lord (F. B. Money-Coutts), 154, 162, 167, 183 Laus Veneris, Swinburne's, 155 Lear, Edward, 111 "Lectures on Poetry," Keble's, 114 Leipsic, University of, 76 "Letters on a Regicide Peace," Burke's, 155 "Life of Cowley," Johnson's, 193 "Life of Johnson," Boswell's, Lincoln, Abraham, 124 "Literary Study of the Bible," Moulton's, 162 "Lives of the Lord Chancellors," John Campbell's, 155 Longinus, 148, 149, 150, 151, 212 et seq. "Longinus on the Sublime," 149, 150, 212 et seq. Louvain, University of, 76 Lowell, James Russell, 211 Lucian, 108 "Luke, Gospel of St," 161 Lycidas, 164

Macaulay, Lord, 19, 155, 156 "Macbeth," 71 Macchiavelli, 197 Maeterlinck, 174, 175 Malherbe, 193 Malory, Sir Thomas, 193 "Man of Law's Tale, The," 71 "Manfred," 155 Map, Walter, 155, 156 Martin, Violet, 136 Marvell, Andrew, 201 "Matthew, Gospel of St," 137 "Memories, Irish," Somerville's and Ross's, 135 "Merchant of Venice, The," 71 Meredith, George, 5, 110 "Microcosmography," John Earle's, 44 Mill, John Stuart, 93, 155 Milton, John, 27, 62, 65, 93, 94, 111, 127, 131, 145, 162, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 188 Moliere, 79 Money-Coutts, F. B. (Lord Latymer), 154, 162, 167, 183 Montagu, Basil, 211 Moore, Sturge, 124 More, Hannah, 192 More, Sir Thomas, 114 Morris, Richard, 99 "Morte d'Arthur, Le," 155 Motley, 82, 211 Moulton, Dr R. G., 154, 158, 162, 177 "Much Ado About Nothing," 71 Myers, F. W. H., 165, 166

Newman, John Henry, 113, 114, 131, 155, 206 Newton, Sir Isaac, 27, 114 Nicholas V, Pope (Tommaso Parentucelli), 209 North, Sir Thomas, 123 "Notes and Queries," 101 "Nun Priest's Tale, The," 71

"Ode to a Grecian Urn," Keats's, 85,86 "Ode to a Nightingale," Keats's, 85, 86 "Ode to Evening," Collins's, 124 "Ode to Psyche," Keats's, 85 "Odyssey, The," 42, 147, 148 "Of Studies," Bacon's, 21, 22, 23 Omar, 20 "Omar Khayyam," FitzGerald's, 155 "On Liberty," John Stuart Mill's, 155 "On the Art of Writing," 1 "Ossian," 155 "Othello," 52, 71, 89 Oxford, University of, 9, 73, 75, 76, 77, 121

Page, 211 Paine, Thomas, 192 Paley, Frederick, 98, 123 Palgrave, Francis Turner, 15 5 "Pall Mall Gazette, The," 197, 198 "Paradise Lost," 56, 58, 59, 62, 127, 144, 154, 161, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 182, 188, 202 "Paradise Regained," 166, 170 "Paradiso, The," 201 "Pardoner's Tale, The," 71 Parentucelli Tommaso (Pope Nicholas V), 209 Paris, University of, 74, 75 "Parlement of Fowls, The," 27, 71 Pater, Walter, 99, 149 Patmore, Coventry, 33 Pattison, Mark, 70 Paul, St, 32, 60, 81, 82, 147, 161, 165 Peele, 80 Pericles, 124 Perrault, 43, 110 "Pervigilium Veneris, The," 124 "Phaedo, The," 147, 148, 201, 206 "Phaedrus, The," 118, 186 "Piers Ploughman," 155, 156 "Pilgrim's Progress, The," 68 Pindar, 57, 79, 98 Plato, 8, 16, 25, 26, 27, 28, 36, 111, 118, 147, 150, 185 Plutarch, 123 "Poems and Ballads," Swinburne's, 155 "Poet's Charter, The," Lord Latymer's (Money-Coutts), 162 "Poetics," Aristotle's, 52, 58, 59, 129 "Polonius," FitzGerald's, 122 Pope, Alexander, 105, 131, 144, 164, 192, 196 "Prince Charming," Perrault's, 111 "Principia," Newton's, 114 Prior, Matthew, 102 "Prometheus Bound," Aeschylus's, 175, 179, 180, 183 "Prometheus Unbound," Shelley's, 59, 155, 164, 167, 168, 169 "Psalm of Life, The," 56 "Psalm cvii," 158, 159, 160 "Psalm cxiv," Milton's Paraphrase of, 169, "Psalm cxxxvi," Milton's Paraphrase of, 169, 170 "Psalms, The," 139, 144 142, 161 Pythagoras, 27 "Pythian Odes," Pindar's, 98

Quarles, Francis, 155

Rashdall, Hastings, 76 Reade, Charles, 189 "Reading without Tears," 38, 41 "Reason of Church Government," Milton's, 167 Reid, Captain Mayne, 138 "Religio Medici," Sir Thomas Browne's, 189, 190 "Republic," Plato's, 16, 26 "Revelation of St John the Divine, The," 151 "Revellers," Ameipsias's, 21 Rhoades, James, 11, 110, 202, 205 "Rifle Rangers, The," Mayne Reid's, 138 Roberts, Prof. W. Rhys, 150 Ronsard, 193 Ruskin, John, 93, 138, 155, 195 "Ruth," 139, 161

"Sally, Sally Waters," 53 Sainte-Beuve, 99, 199 "St Paul," Myers's, 165, 166 "Samson Agonistes," 170 "Sartor Resartus," Carlyle's, 38, 155 "Scalp Hunters, The," Mayne Reid's, 138 "School for Scandal, The," 89 Scott, Sir Walter, 43, 131 "Sermon on the Mount, The," 128 "Sermon II preached at Pauls upon Christmas Day, in the Evening." 1624, Donne's, 89 "Sermons," Donne's, 155 "Sesame and Lilies," Ruskin's, 138, 195 Sevigne, Madame de, 197 Shakespeare, William, 4, 33, 65, 66, 70, 71, 94, 97, 104, 116, 123, 131, 145, 155, 200, 203, 204, 205 Shelley, 79, 155, 167, 168, 169, 193, 194 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 192 "Sicilian Vine-Dresser, The," Sturge Moore's, 124 Skeat, Walter W., 99 Smiles, Samuel, 194 Smith, Adam, 56, 155, 156 Socrates, 118, 147, 148, 186, 187, 188, 206, 207 Solomon, 156, 157 "Song of Songs," 139, 156, 157, 161 Sophocles, 111 Spenser, 164 Stead, W. T., 197 Steele, Sir Richard, 102, 192 Sternhold, Thomas, 170 "Sthenoboea," Euripides's, 21 "Stradivarius," George Eliot's, 14 "Strayed Reveller," Matthew Arnold's, 124 Stubbs, 101 "Sublimitate, De," Longinus's, 149 Suckling, Sir John, 90 Swift, Jonathan, 105, 131 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 155

"Table Talk," Johnson's, 131 "Tale of a Tub, A," 89 "Task, The," Cowper's, 100 Tasso, 167 Tate, Nahum, 170 Taylor, Edgar, 43 Taylor, Jane, 211 "Tempest, The," 59, 71, 202, 203, 204, 205 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 5, 193, 194 Tertullian, 207 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 82, 146 Theocritus, 124 Thompson, Francis, 155 "Thoughts of Divines and Philosophers," Basil Montagu's, 211 "Thoughts on the Present Discontents," Burke's, 155 Thucydides, 121 "Tintern Abbey," Wordsworth's, 152 Todhunter, Dr, 93 Traherne, Thomas, 29, 44 "Training of the Imagination, The," Rhoades's, 110 "Troilus," 71 Tyndale, William, 97, 145

"Utopia," More's, 114

Vaughan, Henry, 193 "Vicar of Wakefield, The," 144 Vienna, medical school of, 76 "Village Labourer, The," Mr and Mrs Hammond's, 190, 191 Villon, 193 Virgil, 12, 116, 167 "Voyages," Hakluyt's, 155 "Vulgate, The," 170

Walpole, Sir Spencer, 192 Walton, Isaak, 82, 145 "Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith's, 155 Wesley, John, 61 Wessobrunn, 208 "What is and What Might Be," Holmes's, 50, 51, 52 White, Blanco, 31, 112 Wilberforce, 192 "Wisdom, Book of," 144 Wolfe, General, 116 Wordsworth, William, 5, 28, 33, 37, 44, 61, 66, 73, 116, 123, 152, 155, 202, 207 "World's Classics, The," 138 Wright, Aldis, 94, 99 Wyclif, 145

Zadkiel, 139 Zenobia, 212



CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY W. LEWIS. M.A., AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

THE END