sations with Eckermann, the upshot of which is that, if you like, you may say "classical" of any work which is good of its kind. The Iliad is classical; so is the Nibelungenlied. One thing Goethe is certain about (on this occasion at any rate)—that the opposition between classical and romantic has been overdone. It still survives as a formula, like those of Polonius. The romantic revival," a convenient label in histories, is treated as if it were a scientific explanation. It ought to be looked into. Byron notes the opposition of classical and romantic as a new thing in his time. He had read the essays of Stendhal, Racine et Shakespeare, in which the meaning of the terms classic and romantic is examined. The best-known point of Stendhal's is quoted by Pater in his essay on Romanticism. Every true poet, says Stendhal, for example Racine, is romantic while he is alive; when he is dead he is classical. There is a meaning in this, proper to France, which is lost in English. The opposition of classic and romantic there was a real thing, fought out bodily in the theatres it was a debate about the forms of drama, in a country where the theatre was alive. A classical type of drama had been enormously successful, and was still productive, active, predominant in authority, when it was challenged by Victor Hugo and his companions. There was nothing like it in England, and the terms classic and romantic lost their meaning when transferred to this country. The good old-fashioned regular heroic couplets which provoked Keats were not really a dangerous reactionary force, even with Byron as their advocate, like the classical dramatists analysed by Stendhal and discomfited in the day of Hernani. The romantic movement in France made a real obvious outward change in the life of the people, in the fashions of the theatre. For a victory like that of 1830, an historical event, an historical name like "romantic revolt " is not unsuitable. In England there is rivalry between new and old, but the issues are not clearly joined, much less fought out on a visible field with palpable instruments, and there is not the same reason for distinctive badges and liveries. What is classical in English poetry? For one thing there is nothing like the classical drama of France. Strange enough, considering how the humanists in all countries talk similar things about the Unities and so forth. Will any members of this Association trouble themselves to inquire why there is no Racine in England? Possibly not yet the question is not absolutely futile and senseless. Comparing English and French drama we see how a common ideal may fare differently in different countries through local accidents. The theory of classical drama was once important in the talk of English critics. Shakespeare knew all about it; he was a friend of Ben Jonson. They talked, and not many observed the Unities. In France there was the same kind of talk, and a similar neglect of the Unities, till quite late (years after the death of Shakespeare, when Ben Jonson was near his end) the Unities were suddenly discovered by a working dramatist, Corneille, and turned to good effect, to the creation of a new kind of drama, concentrated, intense. The Unities were effective in France because the French drama had proved itself, in practice, not very effective without them. Shakespeare, without them, had made wonderful theatrical patterns of his own, perfect, some of them, in form and symmetry. The French dramatists, such as Alexandre Hardy, doing without the Unities, had not done anything very great. To Corneille the Unities, we may say, are not pedantic academic rules, but pieces of good advice helping him to brace his work better. How he thought of the rules, he has explained in his general discourses and particular reviews of the several plays in the collected edition (1660). His motive is not the scholarly ideal, following the Ancients; it is the practical man's experiment. One of the strange omissions in the life of the humanist ideal is the neglect of Greek tragedy. Every poet rushed to the epic poem; the Athenian dramatists were left alone. Scholars read Greek plays, no doubt, but they hardly ever talked about them in the vernacular. Gascoigne's Jocasta is a translation of an Italian version of the Phoenissae of Euripides: after that I do not remember anything nearly related to Greek tragedy till Dryden and Lee's Oedipus, and that is not exactly a rendering of Sophocles. But where else in English poetry is Sophocles even mentioned except in Dryden's prologue to Oedipus? "Thundering Aeschylus" and Sophocles are indeed summoned by Jonson to do honour to Shakespeare ; on equal terms with Pacuvius, Accius, and "him of Cordova dead." Milton names Sophocles more than once, but conventionally and casually Mr. Hartlib is asked to take note that the Trachiniae is one of the tragedies which treat of household matters. Has any modern poet, except always Racine, studied Greek tragedy as Tasso and Milton studied Homer? Where is Aeschylus among the critics and poets who impose the Ancients on the world? Here he is, in Addison's Spectator, No. 357: "I cannot forbear, therefore, thinking that Sin and Death are as improper agents in a work of this nature, as Strength and Necessity in one of the tragedies of Aeschylus, who represented these two persons nailing down Prometheus to a rock, for which he had been justly censured by the greatest critics.” In France does not Aeschylus count for more than in England with the general reader and playgoer? One remembers the Eumenides of Leconte de Lisle; and I once saw the Persians acted at the Théâtre Français; a noble song of triumph, for the victory of the Republic. A magnanimous thing, it seems to me, for in that great poem the defeated invaders are represented suffering in no ignoble way, with no reviling. The romantic leaders in France were not against the Ancients: Alexandre Dumas found Sophocles a better craftsman for the stage than Voltaire in his Oedipe. The dividing lines of Goth and Greek, barbarian and humanist, medieval and modern, classic and romantic, are never drawn as neatly as the diagrammatist would like. Dryden knows that Chaucer is really classical in spirit and in art, and that Ovid is false wit, too often, in comparison with Chaucer. Addison finds in Chevy Chase the unity and harmony which are wanting in modern little "Gothic" versifiers. And as for medieval and Renaissance art Oxford will testify again; in the staircase of the Hall of Christ Church, which looks like Henry VII. and really was put there in 1640, when Dr. Fell was Dean; or in the successful hypocrisy of the Codrington Library of All Souls-Gothic outside to answer the fifteenth-century chapel on the other side of the quadrangle; inside, the perfect image of the eighteenth century in dignity and grace, unequalled. There never is any conclusion, when people meet and debate about the humanities: there is no particular advice to be given here to the English Association in Oxford. The best has been said by the Master whom I have quoted already, in the inscription for his Abbey of Thelema : FAY CE QUE VOUDRAS "Because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions and withdraws them from vice: which is called HONOUR." THE END. 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