truth; and the hatefulest is conscious falsehood. Now, there _is_
falsehood, nay (which seems strange), even sycophancy, in the old
undistinguishing homage to all that is called classical. Yet why should
men be sycophants in cases where they _must_ be disinterested? Sycophancy
grows out of fear, or out of mercenary self-interest. But what can there
exist of either pointing to an old Greek poet? Cannot a man give his free
opinion upon Homer, without fearing to be waylaid by his ghost? But it is
not _that_ which startles him from publishing the secret demur which his
heart prompts, upon hearing false praises of a Greek poet, or praises
which, if not false, are extravagant. What he fears, is the scorn of his
contemporaries. Let once a party have formed itself considerable enough to
protect a man from the charge of presumption in throwing off the yoke of
_servile_ allegiance to all that is called classical,--let it be a party
ever so small numerically, and the rebels will soon be many. What a man
fears is, to affront the whole storm of indignation, real and affected, in
his own solitary person. 'Goth!' 'Vandal!' he hears from every side. Break
that storm by dividing it, and he will face its anger. 'Let me be a Goth,'
he mutters to himself, 'but let me not dishonor myself by affecting an
enthusiasm which my heart rejects!'

Ever since the restoration of letters there has been a cabal, an academic
interest, a factious league amongst universities, and learned bodies, and
individual scholars, for exalting as something superterrestrial, and quite
unapproachable by moderns, the monuments of Greek literature. France, in
the time of Louis XIV., England, in the latter part of that time; in fact,
each country as it grew polished at some cost of strength, carried this
craze to a dangerous excess--dangerous as all things false are dangerous,
and depressing to the aspirations of genius. Boileau, for instance, and
Addison, though neither [2] of them accomplished in scholarship, nor
either of them extensively read in _any_ department of the classic