THE RELATIONS OF LATIN 189 



For the revival of classical literature in the fourteenth and fif- 

 teenth centuries turned its face in reality, not so much to the past as to 

 the future. And perhaps the most important fact in the history of 

 modern literatures is this, that all the names of first importance are 

 post-Renaissance. 1 Chaucer had caught its spirit; and among its 

 most prominent representatives are to be numbered a Rabelais, a Cer- 

 vantes, a Shakespeare, and later on a Goethe and a Schiller. Herein, 

 I take it, lies the ultimate reason why we study the Greek and Latin 

 classics at all ; their study is in reality a study of our own past, 

 our very own, divorced from which all that is most characteristic 

 in the present is only half-intelligible. Were it not for this, were 

 it true that the world would be exactly what it is if the Greeks 

 and Romans had never existed, as the late Mr. Herbert Spencer 

 thought and said, 2 then, I confess, I should feel that the classical 

 studies could be justified only as a disciplinary study and for the 

 light that Latin throws upon the vocabulary arid syntax of the 

 mother tongue. It is because the precise opposite is true, because 

 modern life is soaked with Greek and still more with Latin influences, 

 that it will always depend for its complete interpretation on a study 

 of the classics that is, so long as the landmarks of our pre- 

 sent culture remain unshifted. And even at the present day the 

 Latin language is to the Latinized classes what it was to our 

 Teutonic ancestors, a second tongue, to which we can apply in a 

 more real sense than to Greek the old saying of Cassiodorus: 

 "Dulcius suscipitur quod patrio sermone narratur." 3 Hence it is 

 that we like to speak of Plato rather than of Platon, and that the 

 Germans, going one step further, convert Bacon into Baco. It 

 is, indeed, a noteworthy phenomenon that the tongue of old 

 Latium should have conquered for itself the New as well as the 

 Old World, and should find now in America a land which not only 

 maintains Latin as an integral part of the school curriculum, but 

 has also given to the Old World some of its most scientific gram- 

 mars and dictionaries. 



Let me illustrate the influence of Latin upon English literature 

 by one fact which I discovered only the other day. One of the most 

 famous speeches of Shakespeare is, I think, based upon what would 

 seem a priori a very unlikely source the treatise of Seneca " On 

 Mercy," an appeal to the reigning Emperor Nero. 4 The leading 



1 Dante is one of the witnesses to the dawn which preceded the day. 

 J See his Autobiography, vol. II, p. 237. 



3 Preface to his De Orthographia, quoted by Sandys, History of Classical 

 Scholarship, p. 254. 



4 Parallels between Seneca's tragedies and Shakespeare have been quoted by 

 J. Churton Collins in his recent Studies in Shdkspere ; but I am not aware that 

 any one has hitherto adduced evidence that any prose work of Seneca was known 

 to Shakespeare. In the light of the De Clementia I am inclined to think that 

 the passage of Titus Andronicus which Mr. Collins regards as based on Cicero 

 Pro Ligario, xn, 32, may also come from Seneca. 



