consideration, they _are_ new. Antiquity produced many monsters, but
none like _them_.

The truth is, that this vast multiplication of readers, within the last
twenty-five years, has changed the prevailing character of readers. The
minority has become the overwhelming majority: the quantity has disturbed
the quality. Formerly, out of every five readers, at least four were, in
some degree, classical scholars: or, if _that_ would be saying too
much, if two of the four had 'small Latin and less Greek,' they were
generally connected with those who had more, or at the worst, who had much
reverence for Latin, and more reverence for Greek. If they did not all
share in the services of the temple, all, at least, shared in the
superstition. But, now-a-days, the readers come chiefly from a class of
busy people who care very little for ancestral crazes. Latin they have
heard of, and some of them know it as a good sort of industrious language,
that even, in modern times, has turned out many useful books,
astronomical, medical, philosophical, and (as Mrs. Malaprop observes)
diabolical; but, as to Greek, they think of it as of an ancient mummy: you
spend an infinity of time in unswathing it from its old dusty wrappers,
and, when you have come to the end, what do you find for your pains? A
woman's face, or a baby's, that certainly is not the better for being
three thousand years old; and perhaps a few ears of wheat, stolen from
Pharaoh's granary; which wheat, when sown [1] in Norfolk or Mid-Lothian,
reaped, thrashed, ground, baked, and hunted through all sorts of tortures,
yields a breakfast roll that (as a Scottish baker observed to me) is 'not
just _that_ bad.' Certainly not: not exactly '_that_ bad;' not worse than
the worst of our own; but still, much fitter for Pharaoh's breakfast-table
than for ours.

I, for my own part, stand upon an isthmus, connecting me, at one terminus,