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APPENDIX F 
the choice, to the country in which he dwelt, and the century in v/hich he 
lived. An Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, an Italian, would draw 
up totally different lists, simply because each must necessarily be the 
child of his own nation.^ 
We are apt to speak of the judgment of‘‘posterity ” as final; but “pos¬ 
terity” is no single entity, and the “posterity” of one age has no neces¬ 
sary sympathy with the judgments of the “posterity” that preceded it by a 
few centuries. Montaigne, in a very amusing and, on the whole, sound 
essay on training children, mentions with pride that when young he read 
Ovid instead of wasting his time on “ ‘King Arthur,’ ‘Lancelot du Lake,’ 
. . . and such idle time-consuming and wit-besotting trash of books, 
wherein youth doth commonly amuse itself.” Of course the trashy books 
which he had specially in mind were the romances which Cervantes not 
long afterward destroyed at a stroke. But Malory’s book and others were 
then extant; and yet Montaigne, in full accord with the educated taste of 
his day, saw in them nothing that was not ridiculous. His choice of Ovid 
as representing a culture and wisdom immeasurably greater and more 
serious shows how much the judgment of the “posterity” of the sixteenth 
century differed from that of the nineteenth, in which the highest literary 
thought was deeply influenced by the legends of Arthur’s knights and 
hardly at all by anything Ovid wrote. Dante offers an even more strik¬ 
ing instance. If “posterity’s” judgment could ever be accepted as final, 
it would seem to be when delivered by a man like Dante in speaking of 
the men of his own calling who had been dead from one to two thousand 
years. Well, Dante gives a list of the six greatest poets. One of them, 
he modestly mentions, is himself, and he was quite right. Then come 
Virgil and Homer, and then Horace, Ovid, and Lucan! Nowadays 
we simply could not understand such a choice, which omits the mighty 
* The same would be true, although of course to a less extent, of an American, an 
Englishman, a Scotchman, and an Irishman, in spite of the fact that all speak sub¬ 
stantially the same language. I am entirely aware that if I made an anthology of poems, 
I should include a great many American poems—like Whittier’s “ Snow-Bound,” “ Icha- 
bod,” and “ Laus Deo”; like Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode” and “Biglow Papers” 
—which could not mean to an Englishman what they mean to me. In the same way, 
such an English anthology as the “ Oxford Book of English Verse ” is a good anthology 
—as good as many other anthologies—as long as it confines itself to the verse of British 
authors. But it would have been far better to exclude American authors entirely; for 
the choice of the American verse included in the volume, compared in quantity and 
quality with the corresponding British verse of the same period which is selected, makes 
it impossible to treat the book seriously, if it is regarded as a compendium of the authors 
of both countries. 
