CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND LEARNING 383 



feet on the fender, the training of the English public school and the 

 dilettante culture of the universities has given to English literature 

 a larger number of scholars who are poets and poets who are scholars 

 than any other literature can boast. As Tickell says in his Life of 

 A ddison, an early acquaintance " with the classics is what may be called 

 the good breeding of poetry." Spenser, Ben Jonson, Milton, Addison, 

 Gray, Johnson, Shelley, Landor, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swin- 

 burne, are only the most prominent names in a list that, by the stand- 

 ards of other literatures, might fairly be enlarged to include Dryden, 

 Pope, Thomson, Byron, and even, in a sense, Shakespeare, if Mr. 

 Churton Collins 1 is to be believed, and Keats. And in consequence 

 no other European literature is so rich in spontaneous and luxuriant 

 classical imagery, or in the exquisite reminiscence and adaptation of 

 classic phrase. 



The detailed illustration of this belongs primarily to the editor 

 of the classics, the commentator on the English poets. Thence it 

 may be collected in monographs such as Professor Lounsbury's 

 inquiry into the learning of Chaucer, Mr. Moore's Scripture and 

 Classics in Dante, Professor Mustard's Classical Echoes in Tenny- 

 svw. Such work is easily confounded with the trifling pedantry of the 

 old-fashioned parallel-passage-monger. Yet it may be redeemed 

 from this by judicious discrimination between incidental quotation 

 and spiritual influence, and careful observation of the distinction 

 between mere coincidence in human commonplace, and traits of 

 difference in resemblance that help to characterize both the model 

 and the copy. 



In any case this despised detail is the indispensable basis of any 

 science of comparative literature that deserves the name. And the 

 critic of modern literature who neglects it exposes himself to strange 

 mishaps. He is liable at any moment to emend the text or discourse 

 on the typical significance of a passage which is a direct translation 

 from the Greek or Latin. He will hear a unique Elizabethan lyric 

 cry in a conceit versified from a Greek Sophist. He will taste the 

 inimitable flavor of Elizabethan euphuism in an antithesis borrowed 

 from Plato or Heraclitus. a " Gorgian figure " imitated from Isocrates, 

 an epigram translated out of Seneca or Lucan. He will discern the 

 moral progress of the age in a panvnetie letter compiled from Iso- 

 crates. Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus. and the Pythagorean 

 verses; and note the symptoms of spiritual decline in a string of 

 cynical epigrams copied from Juvenal and Tacitus. He will detect 

 the distinguishing note of eighteenth-century Deism in a paragraph 

 borrowed from Cicero's DC Xatura Dcorum. illustrate the special 

 quality of Herrick's fancy by a couplet conveyed from Martial, and 

 pitch upon a paraphrase of .Eschylus to typify the romantic imagin- 



1 " Had Shakespeare read the Greek Tragedies? " Fortnightly Review, July, 1903. 



