Worthy, was not all this, of the descendants of the men who fought at
Marathon and Thermopylae? The old Greek civilisation was rotting
swiftly down; while a fire of God was preparing, slowly and dimly, in
that unnoticed Italian town of Rome, which was destined to burn up that
dead world, and all its works.

Callimachus's hymns, those may read who list. They are highly finished
enough; the work of a man who knew thoroughly what sort of article he
intended to make, and what were the most approved methods of making it.
Curious and cumbrous mythological lore comes out in every other line.
The smartness, the fine epithets, the recondite conceits, the bits of
effect, are beyond all praise; but as for one spark of life, of poetry,
of real belief, you will find none; not even in that famous Lavacrum
Palladis which Angelo Poliziano thought worth translating into Latin
elegiacs, about the same time that the learned Florentine, Antonio Maria
Salviano, found Berenice's Hair worthy to be paraphrased back from
Catullus' Latin into Greek, to give the world some faint notion of the
inestimable and incomparable original. They must have had much time on
their hands. But at the Revival of Letters, as was to be expected, all
works of the ancients, good and bad, were devoured alike with youthful
eagerness by the Medicis and the Popes; and it was not, we shall see,
for more than one century after, that men's taste got sufficiently
matured to distinguish between Callimachus and the Homeric hymns, or
between Plato and Proclus. Yet Callimachus and his fellows had an
effect on the world. His writings, as well as those of Philetas, were
the model on which Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus, formed themselves.

And so I leave him, with two hints. If any one wishes to see the
justice of my censure, let him read one of the Alexandrian hymns, and