conviction, and of selection. He sets before us the noblest examples of
the past, most welcome in a straining age which tries already to live in
the future. He admonishes and he inspires. He knows the “marvellous
power and enthralling charm of appropriate and striking words” without
dropping into mere word-tasting. “Beautiful words are the very light of
thought,” he says, but does not maunder about the “colour” of words, in
the style of the decadence. And then he “leaves this generation to its
fate,” and calmly turns himself to the work that lies nearest his hand.

To us he is as much a moral as a literary teacher. We admire that Roman
greatness of soul in a Greek, and the character of this unknown man, who
carried the soul of a poet, the heart of a hero under the gown of a
professor. He was one of those whom books cannot debilitate, nor a life
of study incapacitate for the study of life.

A. L.




I

1
The treatise of Caecilius on the Sublime, when, as you remember, my dear
Terentian, we examined it together, seemed to us to be beneath the
dignity of the whole subject, to fail entirely in seizing the salient
points, and to offer little profit (which should be the principal aim of
every writer) for the trouble of its perusal. There are two things
essential to a technical treatise: the first is to define the subject;
the second (I mean second in order, as it is by much the first in