"having achieved what men may, have borne what men must." This is the
very burden of life, and the last word of tragedy. For now all is vain:
courage, wisdom, piety, the bravery of Lamachus, the goodness of Nicias,
the brilliance of Alcibiades, all are expended, all wasted, nothing of
that brave venture abides, except torture, defeat, and death. No play
not poem of individual fortunes is so moving as this ruin of a people; no
modern story can stir us, with all its eloquence, like the brief gravity
of this ancient history. Nor can we find, at the last, any wisdom more
wise than that which bids us do what men may, and bear what men must.
Such are the lessons of the Greek, of the people who tried all things, in
the morning of the world, and who still speak to us of what they tried in
words which are the sum of human gaiety and gloom, of grief and triumph,
hope and despair. The world, since their day, has but followed in the
same round, which only seems new: has only made the same experiments, and
failed with the same failure, but less gallantly and less gloriously.

One's school-boy adventures among books ended not long after winning the
friendship of Homer and Thucydides, of Lucretius and Catullus. One's
application was far too desultory to make a serious and accurate scholar.

I confess to having learned the classical languages, as it were by
accident, for the sake of what is in them, and with a provokingly
imperfect accuracy. Cricket and trout occupied far too much of my mind
and my time: Christopher North, and Walton, and Thomas Tod Stoddart, and
"The Moor and the Loch," were my holiday reading, and I do not regret it.
Philologists and Ireland scholars are not made so, but you can, in no
way, fashion a scholar out of a casual and inaccurate intelligence. The
true scholar is one whom I envy, almost as much as I respect him; but
there is a kind of mental short-sightedness, where accents and verbal