Τῷ δ ̓ ἤδη δύο μὲν γενεαὶ μερόπων ἀνθρώπων

Εφθίαθ ̓.

I make this familiar quotation for two reasons: because Chapman translates μeрów "divers-languaged," which is apt for our occasion, and because it enables me to make an easier transition to what I am about to say; namely, that I rise to address you not without a certain feeling of embarrassment. For every man is, more or less consciously, the prisoner of his date, and I must confess that I was a great while in emancipating myself from the formula which prescribed the Greek and Latin Classics as the canonical books of that infallible Church of Culture outside of which there could be no salvation,- none, at least, that was orthodox. Indeed, I am not sure that I have wholly emancipated myself even yet. The old phrases (for mere phrases they had mostly come to be) still sing in my ears with a pleasing if not a prevailing enchantment.

The traditions which had dictated this formula were of long standing and of eminent respectability. They dated back to the exemplaria Græca of Horace. For centuries the languages which served men for all the occasions of private life were put under a ban, and the revival of learning extended this outlawry to the literature, such as it was, that had found vent through them. Even the authors of that literature tacitly admitted the justice of such condemnation when they used the word Latin as meaning language par excellence, just as the Newfoundlanders say fish when they

mean cod. They could be witty, eloquent, pathetic, poetical, competent, in a word, to every demand of their daily lives, in their mother-tongue, as the Greeks and Romans had been in theirs, but all this would not do; what was so embalmed would not keep. All the prudent and forethoughtful among them accordingly were careful to put their thoughts and fancies, or what with them supplied the place of these commodities, into Latin as the one infallible pickle. They forgot the salt, to be sure, an ingredient which the author alone can furnish. For it is not the language in which a man writes, but what he has been able to make that language say or sing, that resists decay. Yet men were naturally a great while in reaching this conviction. They thought it was not good form, as the phrase is, to be pleased with what, and what alone, really touched them home. The reproach at vestri proavi- rang deterrent in their ears. The author of "Partonopeus de Blois," it is true, plucks up a proper spirit:

"Cil clerc dient que n'est pas sens
Qu'escrive estoire d'antif tens,
Quant je nes escris en latin,
Et que je perc mon tans enfin;

Cil le perdent qui ne font rien
Moult plus que je ne fac le mien."

And the sarcasm of the last couplet was more biting even than the author thought it. Those moderns who wrote in Latin truly ne faisoient rien, for I cannot recollect any work of the kind that has in any sense survived as literature, unless it

be the "Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum" (whose Latin is a part of its humor) and a few short copies of verse, as they used, aptly enough, to be called. Milton's foreign correspondence as Secretary for the Commonwealth was probably the latest instance of the use of Latin in diplomacy.

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You all remember Du Bellay's eloquent protest, "I cannot sufficiently blame the foolish arrogance and temerity of some of our nation, who, being least of all Greeks or Latins, depreciate and reject with a more than Stoic brow everything written in French, and I cannot sufficiently wonder at the strange opinion of some learned men, who think our vernacular incapable of all good literature and erudition." When this was said, Montaigne was already sixteen years old, and, not to speak of the great mass of verse and prose then dormant in manuscript, France had produced in Rabelais a great humorist and strangely open-eyed thinker, and in Villon a poet who had written at least one immortal poem, which still touches us with that painless sense of the lachrymæ rerum so consoling in poetry and the burthen of which

"Ou sont les neiges d'antan ?"

falters and fades away in the ear like the last stroke of Beauty's passing-bell. I must not let you forget that Du Bellay had formed himself on the classics, and that he insists on the assiduous study of them. "Devour them," he says, "not in order to imitate, but to turn them into blood and nutriment." And surely this always has been and always will be their true use.

It was not long before the living languages justified their right to exist by producing a living literature, but as the knowledge of Greek and Latin was the exclusive privilege of a class, that class naturally made an obstinate defence of its vested rights. Nor was it less natural that men like Bacon, who felt that he was speaking to the civilized world, and lesser men, who fancied themselves charged with a pressing message to it, should choose to utter themselves in the only tongue that was cosmopolitan. But already such books as had more than a provincial meaning, though written in what the learned still looked on as patois, were beginning to be translated into the other European languages. The invention of printing had insensibly but surely enlarged the audience which genius addresses. That there were persons in England who had learned something of French, Italian, Spanish, and of High and Low Dutch three centuries ago is shown by the dramatists of the day, but the speech of the foreigner was still generally regarded as something noxious. Later generations shared the prejudice of sturdy Abbot Samson, who confirmed the manor of Thorpe "cuidam Anglico natione. . . de cujus fidelitate plenius confidebat quia bonus agricola erat et quia nesciebat loqui Gallice." This was in 1182, but there is a still more amusing instance of the same prejudice so lately as 1668. "Erasmus hath also a notable story of a man of the same age, an Italian, that had never been in Germany, and yet he spake the German tongue most elegantly, being as one

possessed of the Devil; notwithstanding was cured by a Physician that administered a medicine which expelled an infinite number of worms, whereby he was also freed of his knowledge of the German tongue." 1 Dr. Ramesey seems in doubt whether the vermin or the language were the greater deliverance.

Even after it could no longer be maintained that no masterpiece could be written in a modern language, it was affirmed, and on very plausible grounds, that no masterpiece of style could be so written unless after sedulous study of the ancient and especially of the Grecian models. This may have been partially, but was it entirely true? Were those elements of the human mind which tease it with the longing for perfection in literary workmanship peculiar to the Greeks? Before the new birth of letters, Dante (though the general scheme of his great poem be rather mechanical than organic) had given proof of a style, which, where it is best, is so parsimonious in the number of its words, so goldenly sufficient in the value of them, that we must go back to Tacitus for a comparison, and perhaps not even to him for a parallel. But Dante was a great genius, and language curtsies to its natural kings. I will take a humbler instance, the Chant-fable of "Aucassin and Nicolete," rippling into song, and subsiding from it unconsciously as a brook. Leaving out the episode of the King of

1 From a treatise on worms by William Ramesey, physician in ordinary to Charles II., which contains some very direct hints of the modern germ-theory of disease.