306 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



if I may so call our literature or art, has the Greek influence been a 

 living and potent force, and, indeed, bids fair to continue to be. 

 Not only are the forms of our literature Greek in their origin, but 

 not seldom has an English writer caught and handed on the spirit of 

 his master and model. 



If this be true, then we of the universities are guilty of a 

 strange inconsistency. We say that a man is not a good Latin 

 scholar if he be not at the same time a good Greek scholar ; that a 

 man cannot know his Yergil unless he know his Homer, or his 

 Horace unless he be acquainted with the Greek lyric poets. But we 

 do not say, at least the requirements for higher degrees in our uni- 

 versities do not say, that a man in order to be an English scholar 

 should be at the same time a Greek scholar. Why does not the 

 same argument apply? If a man cannot intelligently understand 

 his Vergil without knowing his Homer, then how can he fully appre- 

 ciate his Milton, his Tennyson, his Matthew Arnold, his Shelley, and 

 not be able to feel that they also were taught by the Muses of Helicon 

 and had drunk of Hippocrene? 



No thoughtful student of both literatures would deny, I think, 

 that the debt of English literature to Greek, direct or indirect, is 

 incalculably great ; not that we can in every case put our hand on 

 Greek influences in our English writers and say that it is there or 

 here, for they are often too subtle and intangible for that, but in 

 many cases they are so definite and clear that he who runs may read. 



It is, perhaps, in the realm of pastoral poetry that we may see 

 more clearly than anywhere else the influence of Greek models upon 

 English verse. If the spirit often changes, the form remains essen- 

 tially the same, and through the stubborn persistence of this form, 

 with all its curious devices, we can, directly and indirectly, trace the 

 lineage of the modern pastoral back to its Greek father, Theocritus 

 and his immediate children, Bion and Moschus. 



If one would take, for instance, one type of the Greek pastoral 

 eclogue, the dirge, sung by one shepherd in lamentation over the 

 misfortunes and death of another, and consider it in connection with 

 the innumerable dirges in modern pastoral song, he could not, if he 



