moderns, he invented Greek accents; thereby, I fear, so complicating and
confusing our notions of Greek rhythm, that we shall never, to the end
of time, be able to guess what any Greek verse, saving the old Homeric
Hexameter, sounded like. After a while, too, the pedants, according to
their wont, began quarrelling about their accents and their recessions.
Moreover, there was a rival school at Pergamus where the fame of Crates
all but equalled the Egyptian fame of Aristarchus. Insolent! What
right had an Asiatic to know anything? So Aristarchus flew furiously on
Crates, being a man of plain common sense, who felt a correct reading a
far more important thing than any of Crates's illustrations, aesthetic,
historical, or mythological; a preference not yet quite extinct, in one,
at least, of our Universities. "Sir," said a clever Cambridge Tutor to
a philosophically inclined freshman, "remember, that our business is to
translate Plato correctly, not to discover his meaning." And,
paradoxical as it may seem, he was right. Let us first have accuracy,
the merest mechanical accuracy, in every branch of knowledge. Let us
know what the thing is which we are looking at. Let us know the exact
words an author uses. Let us get at the exact value of each word by
that severe induction of which Buttmann and the great Germans have set
such noble examples; and then, and not till then, we may begin to talk
about philosophy, and aesthetics, and the rest. Very Probably
Aristarchus was right in his dislike of Crates's preference of what he
called criticism, to grammar. Very probably he connected it with the
other object of his especial hatred, that fashion of interpreting Homer
allegorically, which was springing up in his time, and which afterwards
under the Neoplatonists rose to a frantic height, and helped to destroy
in them, not only their power of sound judgment, and of asking each
thing patiently what it was, but also any real reverence for, or
understanding of, the very authors over whom they declaimed and
sentimentalised.