and her literature almost barbarous.

The preposterousness of this judgment as a whole must not blind us to
the fragment of truth which it included. England's literature was, in
many respects, very imperfect and chaotic. Her "singing masons" had
already built her "roofs of gold"; Hooker and one or two other great
prose-writers stood like towers: but the less exalted portions of the
edifice were still half hewn. Some literatures, like the Latin and the
French, rise gradually to the crest of their perfection; others, like
the Greek and the English, place themselves almost from the first on
their loftiest pinnacle, leaving vast gaps to be subsequently filled in.
Homer was not less the supreme poet because history was for him
literally an old song, because he would have lacked understanding for
Plato and relish for Aristophanes. Nor were Shakespeare and the
translators of the Bible less at the head of European literature because
they must have failed as conspicuously as Homer would have failed in all
things save those to which they had a call, which chanced to be the
greatest. Literature, however, cannot remain isolated at such altitudes,
it must expand or perish. As Homer's epic passed through Pindar and the
lyrical poets into drama history and philosophy, continually fitting
itself more and more to become an instrument in the ordinary affairs of
life, so it was needful that English lettered discourse should become
popular and pliant, a power in the State as well as in the study. The
magnitude of the change, from the time when the palm of popularity
decorated Sidney's "Arcadia" to that when it adorned Defoe and Bunyan,
would impress us even more powerfully if the interval were not engrossed
by a colossal figure, the last of the old school in the erudite
magnificence of his style in prose and verse; the first of the new,
inasmuch as English poetry, hitherto romantic, became in his hands
classical. This "splendid bridge from the old world to the new," as