PROBLEMS OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE 389 



its compilations of compilations. Then supervened the Dark Ages, 

 when the lamp of pure literature, if trimmed at all, was trimmed for 

 the service of sacerdotalism, or, burning low in an alien atmosphere, 

 little drew the eyes of men: an age when literature was made sub- 

 sidiary, treated as a storehouse of materials for discipline in the arts 

 of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and not as a noble end in itself - 

 the auctores being slaves of the artes. These times were followed by 

 the Great Awakening, when little by little the full significance of the 

 ancient heritage dawned on men: at first, a period of literary enthu- 

 siasm, when the form of ancient literature chiefly engaged the atten- 

 tion of the educated world, and men sought to write like the ancient 

 masters; then, a period when the interest of scholars was turned 

 from the form to the matter, when the items of knowledge and wis- 

 dom buried in the ancient writers were disinterred, and set forth in 

 works and editions that are even to-day marvels of learning and 

 lore. Next followed an age of criticism, which was exercised mainly 

 en the texts of classical w r riters. "It was," as Professor Hardie has 

 said, " neither creative nor ardent, like the first [period], nor ency- 

 clopedic in its material knowledge like the second, but critical 

 and grammatical." It clarified the texts, healed corrupt places, 

 sought to establish canons of idiom, formulated the laws of meter, 

 discriminated with severe judgment the spurious and the authentic 

 in ancient literature. Finally, hardly more than a century ago, be- 

 gan a period of classical scholarship in which all the finer qualities 

 of the three preceding periods (since the Renaissance) are happily 

 combined and developed, an age of searching criticism, of ency- 

 clopedic learning enlarged by the lessons of comparative grammar, 

 of history, of art and archaeology, and of enlightened literary en- 

 thusiasm and appreciation, an age of better methods in all depart- 

 ments of classical scholarship and of the coordination of these de- 

 partments into a single whole, so that one throws light on the other. 

 The outcome of it all is that we may to-day say to the wise student 

 of the ancient texts, what was said to Macrobius centuries ago: 



mcliora reddis quam Icgcndo sumpscras. 



The conception of the function of the student and teacher of 

 classical literature has thus varied somewhat from century to cen- 

 tury, ever gaining new and enriched meaning-. But I doubt whether 

 we have much improved upon the definition of this function as given 

 toward the close of the Alexandrian age and recorded by a commen- 

 tator on Dionysius the Thracian, the first of the venerable guild of 

 grammarians. The task of the ypa^ariKo^ or student and teacher of 

 literature, we are told, has four parts, TO avayvwo-TLKov, "accurate 

 reading aloud "; TO etv/yv/rtKor, '''explanation "; TO 8iopOwTiK(>r, "correc- 

 tion of the text ''; and TO K/jm/coY. " criticism." i, c. mainly a?sthetic. 



