satirical spirit, and an appeal to common sense as supreme judge, stamp
most of the writers of western Europe as so far pupils of Horace, Cicero,
and Tacitus. At present the tide has turned. We are living in a period of
strong reaction. The nineteenth century not only differs from the
eighteenth, but in all fundamental questions is opposed to it. Its
products have been strikingly original. In art, poetry, science, the
spread of culture, and the investigation of the basis of truth, it yields
to no other epoch of equal length in the history of modern times. If we go
to either of the nations of antiquity to seek for an animating impulse, it
will not be Rome but Greece that will immediately suggest itself to us.
Greek ideas of aesthetic beauty, and Greek freedom of abstract thought,
are being disseminated in the world with unexampled rapidity. Rome, and
her soberer, less original, and less stimulating literature, find no place
for influence. The readiness with which the leading nations drink from the
well of Greek genius points to a special adaptation between the two.
Epochs of upheaval, when thought is rife, progress rapid, and tradition,
political or religious, boldly examined, turn, as if by necessity, to
ancient Greece for inspiration. The Church of the second and third
centuries, when Christian thought claimed and won its place among the
intellectual revolutions of the world, did not disdain the analogies of
Greek philosophy. The Renaissance owed its rise, and the Reformation much
of its fertility, to the study of Greek. And the sea of intellectual
activity which now surges round us moves ceaselessly about questions which
society has not asked itself since Greece started them more than twenty
centuries age. On the other hand, periods of order, when government is
strong and progress restrained, recognise their prototypes in the
civilisation of Rome, and their exponents in her literature. Such was the
time of the Church's greatest power: such was also that of the fully
developed monarchy in France, and of aristocratic ascendancy in England.
Thus the two literatures wield alternate influence; the one on the side of