can best
preserve all that is good in our existing system.

Whatever temporary effect appeals of this sort may produce, it is
certain that the ultimate result must depend very greatly on the extent
to which a real interest in classical literature can be kept alive in
the minds of the rising and of future generations. How can this object
best be achieved? The question is one of vital importance.

The writer of the present article would be the last to attempt to raise
a cheap laugh at the expense of that laborious and, as it may appear to
some, almost useless erudition which, for instance, led Professor
Hermann to write four books on the particle [Greek: an] and to indite a
learned dissertation on [Greek: autos]. The combination of industry and
enthusiasm displayed in efforts such as these has not been wasted. The
spirit which inspired them has materially contributed to the real stock
of valuable knowledge which the world possesses. None the less it must
be admitted that something more than mere erudition is required to
conjure away the perils which the humanities now have to face. It is
necessary to quicken the interest of the rising generation, to show them
that it is not only historically true to say, with Lessing, that "with
Greece the morning broke," but that it is equally true to maintain that
in what may, relatively speaking, be called the midday splendour of
learning, we cannot dispense with the guiding light of the early morn;
that Greek literature, in Professor Gilbert Murray's words,[92] is "an
embodiment of the progressive spirit, an expression of the struggle of
the human soul towards freedom and ennoblement"; and that our young men
and women will be, both morally and intellectually, the poorer if they
listen to the insidious and deceptive voice of an exaggerated
materialism which whispers that amidst the hum of modern machinery and
the heated wrangles incident to the perplexing problems which arise as
the world grows older, the knowledge of a language and a literature
which have survived two thousand eight hundred storm-tossed years is "of
no practical use."

It is this interest which the works of a man like the late Dr. Verrall
serve to stimulate. He was eminently fitted for the task. On the
principle which Dr. Johnson mocked by saying that "who drives fat oxen
should himself be fat," it may be said that an advocate of humanistic
learning should himself be human in the true and Terentian meaning of
that