CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND LEARNING 379 



Virgilian epic, and the point, finish, and hard-surface polish of Latin 

 epistle, satire, and epigram. 



To eighteenth-century sentimentalists, who saw it through the 

 eyes of Rollin or Rousseau, it is the heroic and virtuous antiquity 

 of Plutarchan naivete, the nobly draped patriotic antiquity of Livy. 

 It is Seneca recasting in rhetorical epistles the antithetic paradoxes 

 of Stoic ethics, Juvenal declaiming against luxury, Tacitus idealizing 

 the blue-eyed barbarian and retrospectively tempering despotism with 

 epigram. 



To the philosophy of pre-Revolutionary France it is enlightenment 

 emancipating from dogma and superstition, nature throwing off the 

 yoke of artificial convention. 



To the nineteenth century it is the recapture of something of that 

 first careless Renaissance rapture tempered by a finer historical 

 sense, controlled by a more critical scholarship. It is the recon- 

 struction of the total life of Grseco-Roman civilization by German 

 philology. It is the Periclean ideal of a complete culture reinter- 

 preted by Goethe and Matthew Arnold. It is the deeper sense of the 

 quality of the supreme masters, Homer, ^Eschylus, Pindar, Plato, 

 Aristophanes. It is Greek sculpture recovered from the soil and ap- 

 preciated by the finer connoisseurship that is aware of the difference 

 between the Apollo Belvedere and the Hermes of Praxiteles, and the 

 " Theseus " of the Parthenon. It is the inspiration of Greek poetry 

 revived in Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Arnold, and Swinburne. It 

 is Greek philosophy, an unexhausted domain of research for the 

 scholar, an inexhaustible source of suggestion for the thinker and 

 the poet. 



If we turn from the European to the national tradition, each of the 

 great modern literatures will claim for itself the preeminence which 

 Bursian's excellent history of classical philology asserts for Germany. 

 And each will be in a measure justified. The culture of Italy never 

 lost touch with Rome, and medievalism there was the twilight of 

 an arctic summer. It was no mere affectation of the Renaissance 

 that regarded Italian literature as one. whether written in Latin or 

 the vernacular. The unity of tradition and the unity of national 

 feeling imposed this point of view. Dante reaches the hand to Virgil 

 across the centuries in a way impossible to a Chaucer or a Racine. 

 And in the heroic lines of Petrarch, repeated as a trumpet-call in 

 Machia velli's Prince, in Leopardi's Ode to Anijclo Mai. on the re- 

 covery of Cicero's Republic from a Vatican palimpsest, in Carducci's 

 ringing alcaics on the exhumation of the Brescia Victory, we are 

 sensible of a fervor and glow of feeling which no antiquarian theme 

 could kindle in Northern breasts. Petrarch, the inaugurate!' of the 

 Renaissance, the first literary dictator of Europe, and the first 

 modern man. felt himself as much a Latin author as an Italian. 



