116 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



and you cannot eat enough.' Truly the Christian Church had its reasons, 

 down there, when it prescribed fasting in Lent. 



It was, then, mainly unavoidable ignorance, imposed by the political 

 situation, that paralysed geographical commentary on ancient history and 

 literature. But this happened, unfortunately, close to the time when the 

 great Dutch scholars of the seventeenth century, and thereafter our own 

 Bentley, gave a new birth to linguistic study, and gave also to ' scholarship ' 

 the narrower meaning which it has unluckily retained so long. It happened, 

 unfortuTiately also, at a moment when the social cleavage which resulted 

 in this country from the Civil War, and still more from the behaviour of 

 the ' Restored ' in matters of faith and citizenship, c\it English education 

 — I cannot speak for Scottish — into two differently conducted halves. 

 All that side of the national heritage which descended from the culture 

 of Israel remained essentially vernacular, with no bogey of ' compulsory 

 Hebrew ' to repel the beginner, until the need to read Hebrew for himself 

 overmastered Idm from within. This heritage had been, and remained, 

 common to all, though for all alike it was divorced, for the reasons already 

 noted, from its geographical context and background. But, in the trans- 

 mission of the ' Legacy of Greece ' the Renaissance use of popular transla- 

 tions in popular education — the chained copy of North's ' Plutarch ' in 

 the village church, alongside the Authorised Version, as you may see it 

 at Bicester to-day — gave place to the strict ' classical education ' of the 

 public schools and older universities, initiated in the ' preparatory ' 

 schools as they arose ; and displaced into the nursery the vernacular 

 discipline of an ' authorised ' crib. Formal scholarship became indis- 

 pensable prerequisite to study of Mediterranean culture ; history and 

 geography, as interpreters of the meaning of great literatures, gave place 

 to ' gerund-grinding ' and vain ' repetitions,' as you may hear students 

 crooning the Koran in a Moslem university to-day. 



It was more than a century before reaction came : and the new 

 renaissance in classical and oriental studies came, like the old, very 

 largely from outside. What the discoverers of America and the outer 

 Oceans were to the men of 1493, the pioneers in physics, chemistry and 

 biology were to the generation of 1793. Herder's Ideen zur Philosophie 

 der Geschichte der Menschheit began to appear in 1784 ; it had been preceded 

 in 1778 by his Stimmen der Volker in Liedern, the first regional investigation 

 of popular literature, and in 1782 by Vom Geist der hebniischen Poesie, 

 which inaugurates the scientific study of the ' Legacy of Israel.' Wolf's 

 Prolegomena to Homer appeared in the next year, 1795 ; and, speaking 

 on Scottish soil, more especially am I bound to commemorate the debt 

 both of Wolf and of Herder to Percy's Reliques and Macpherson's Ossian. 

 and as an Englishman, Wolf's obligation to Robert Wood's Essay on the 

 Original Genius of Homer, the first study of Greek literature on Greek seas, 

 and of Biblical institutions in a Bedawin tent at Palmyra. How close 

 the beginnings of modern geography lie to this movement in history and 

 literature needs hardly to be illustrated. But Alexander von Humboldt 

 was, like Wolf , a pupil of old Heyne atGottingen, and close friend of Heyne's 

 son-in-law Georg Forster, the naturalist and chronicler of Captain Cook ; 

 and it was in the same Gottingen circle a little later (1814-19) that Karl 

 Ritter matured his Erdkunde im Verhallnis zur Natur und zur Geschichte 

 des Menschen (1817-18), followed by his essay on prehistoric ethnology 



