were something, brickbats were something; but an old superannuated
tense! That any grown man should trouble himself about _that!_ Indeed
there _was_ something extraordinary there. For it is not amongst the
ordinary functions of lawyers to take charge of Greek; far less, one
might suppose, of lawyers of Scotland, where the _general_ system of
education has moved for two centuries upon a principle of slight regard
to classical literature. Latin literature was very much neglected, and
Greek nearly altogether. The more was the astonishment at finding a
rare delicacy of critical instinct, as well as of critical sagacity,
applied to the Greek idiomatic niceties by a Scottish lawyer, viz.,
that the same eccentric judge, first made known to us by our tutor.

To the majority of readers, meantime, at this day, Lord M. is memorable
chiefly for his craze about the degeneracy of us poor moderns, when
compared with the men of pagan antiquity; which craze itself might
possibly not have been generally known, except in connection with the
little skirmish between him and Dr. Johnson, noticed in Boswell's
account of the doctor's Scottish tour. "Ah, doctor," said Lord M.,
upon some casual suggestion of that topic, "poor creatures are we of
this eighteenth century; our fathers were better men than we!" "O, no,
my lord," was Johnson's reply; "we are quite as strong as our
forefathers, and a great deal wiser! "Such a craze, however, is too
widely diffused, and falls in with too obstinate a preconception
[17] in the human race, which has in every age hypochondriacally regarded
itself as under some fatal necessity of dwindling, much to have
challenged public attention. As real paradoxes (spite of the idle meaning
attached usually to the word _paradox_) have often no falsehood in them,
so here, on the contrary, was a falsehood which had in it nothing
paradoxical. It contradicted all the indications of history and
experience, which uniformly had pointed in the very opposite direction;