the matter!"

"Your Latin verses [translating Cowley] I greatly enjoy. The dear old
Abraham goes straight off into your beautiful lines. Of course he
has not a scrap of modern _impedimenta_. You go through the customs
at the frontier with a whistle and a smile. You have _nothing to
declare_. The blessed old man by your side is himself a Roman to
begin with, and you pass together as cheerfully as possible. . . ."

"I have also been reading Karl Elze's _Essays on Shakespeare_.
He is not bad, but don't you resent the imperturbable confidence of
men who, after attributing a play of Shakespeare's to two authors,
proceed to suggest a third, urged thereto by some fatuous and
self-sought exigency?"

"Did you ever try to write a Burns song? I mean the equivalent in
ordinary English of his Scotch. Can it be done? A Yorkshireman--
could he do it? A Lancashire man (Waugh)? I hardly think so.
The Ayrshire dialect has a _Schwung_ and a confidence that no-English
county can pretend to. Our dialects are apologetic things,
half-ashamed, half-insolent. Burns has no doubts, and for his
audience unhesitatingly demands the universe. . . ."

"There is an ethos in Fitzgerald's letters which is so exquisitely
idyllic as to be almost heavenly. He takes you with him, exactly
accommodating his pace to yours, walks through meadows so tranquil,
and yet abounding in the most delicate surprises. And these
surprises seem so familiar, just as if they had originated with
yourself. What delicious blending! What a perfect interweft of
thought and diction! What a _sweet_ companion!"

Lastly, let me quote a passage in which his thoughts return to Clifton,
where it had been suggested that Greek should be omitted from the ordinary
form-routine and taught in "sets," or separate classes:--

"This is disturbing about Greek, 'set' Greek. Yes, you would fill
your school to overflowing, of course you would, so long as other
places did not abandon the old lines. But it would be detestable
treachery to the cause of education, of humanity. To me the
_learning_ of any blessed thing is a matter of little moment.
Greek is not learned by nineteen-twentieths of our Public School
boys. But it is a baptism into a cult, a faith, not more irrational
than other faiths or cults; the baptism of a