magnanimity of the Classic ideal has had scant justice done to it
by modern criticism. To make literature the crowning symbol of a
world-wide civilisation; to roof in the ages, and unite the elect
of all time in the courtesy of one shining assembly, paying duty to
one unquestioned code; to undo the work of Babel, and knit together
in a single community the scattered efforts of mankind towards
order and reason;--this was surely an aim worthy of labour and
sacrifice. Both have been freely given, and the end is yet to
seek. The self-assertion of the recusants has found eulogists in
plenty, but who has celebrated the self-denial that was thrown away
on this other task, which is farther from fulfilment now than it
was when the scholars of the Renaissance gave up their patriotism
and the tongue of their childhood in the name of fellow-citizenship
with the ancients and the oecumenical authority of letters?
Scholars, grammarians, wits, and poets were content to bury the
lustre of their wisdom and the hard-won fruits of their toil in the
winding-sheet of a dead language, that they might be numbered with
the family of Cicero, and added to the pious train of Virgil. It
was a noble illusion, doomed to failure, the versatile genius of
language cried out against the monotony of their Utopia, and the
crowds who were to people the unbuilded city of their dreams went
straying after the feathered chiefs of the rebels, who, when the
fulness of time was come, themselves received apotheosis and the
honours of a new motley pantheon. The tomb of that great vision
bears for epitaph the ironical inscription which defines a Classic
poet as "a dead Romantic."

In truth the Romantics are right, and the serenity of the classic
ideal is the serenity of paralysis and death. A universal
agreement in the use of words facilitates communication, but, so