520 APPENDIX F 



the choice, to the country in which he dwelt, and the century in which he 

 lived. An Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, an Italian, would draw 

 up totally different lists, simply because each must necessarily be the 

 child of his own nation.* 



We are apt to speak of the judgment of " posterity " as final; but "pos- 

 terity" is no single entity, and the "posterity" of one age has no neces- 

 sary sympathy with the judgments of the "posterity" that preceded it by a 

 few centuries. Montaigne, in a very amusing and, on the whole, sound 

 essay on training children, mentions with pride that when young he read 

 Ovid instead of wasting his time on " 'King Arthur,' 'Lancelot du Lake,' 

 . . . and such idle time-consuming and wit-besotting trash of books, 

 wherein youth doth commonly amuse itself." Of course the trashy books 

 which he had specially in mind were the romances which Cervantes not 

 long afterward destroyed at a stroke. But Malory's book and others were 

 then extant; and yet Montaigne, in full accord with the educated taste of 

 his day, saw in them nothing that was not ridiculous. His choice of Ovid 

 as representing a culture and wisdom immeasurably greater and more 

 serious shows how much the judgment of the "posterity" of the sixteenth 

 century differed from that of the nineteenth, in which the highest literary 

 thought was deeply influenced by the legends of Arthur's knights and 

 hardly at all by anything Ovid wrote. Dante offers an even more strik- 

 ing instance. If "posterity's " judgment could ever be accepted as final, 

 it would seem to be when delivered by a man like Dante in speaking of 

 the men of his own calling who had been dead from one to two thousand 

 years. Well, Dante gives a list of the six greatest poets. One of them, 

 he modestly mentions, is himself, and he was quite right. Then come 

 Virgil and Homer, and then Horace, Ovid, and Lucan! Nowadays 

 we simply could not understand such a choice, which omits the mighty 



* The same would be true, although of course to a less extent, of an American, an 

 Englishman, a Scotchman, and an Irishman, in spite of the fact that all speak sub- 

 stantially the same language. I am entirely aware that if I made an anthology of poems, 

 I should include a great many American poems like Whittier's " Snow-Bound," " Icha- 

 bod," and " Laus Deo "; like Lowell's " Commemoration Ode " and " Biglow Papers " 

 which could not mean to an Englishman what they mean to me. In the same way, 

 such an English anthology as the " Oxford Book of English Verse" is a good anthology 

 as good as many other anthologies as long as it confines itself to the verse of British 

 authors. But it would have been far better to exclude American authors entirely; for 

 the choice of the American verse included in the volume, compared in quantity and 

 quality with the corresponding British verse of the same period which is selected, makes 

 it impossible to treat the book seriously, if it is regarded as a compendium of the authors 

 of both countries. 



