With pedant, hypocrite, and pope.

One might easily lecture about this little volume for many more days, so
beautiful are the things which fill it. But enough has been cited to
exemplify its unique value. If you reread these quotations, I think you
will find each time new beauty in them. And the beauty is quite peculiar.
Such poetry could have been written only under two conditions. The first
is that the poet be a consummate scholar. The second is that he must have
suffered, as only a great mind and heart could suffer, from want of
affection.

CHAPTER XV

OLD GREEK FRAGMENTS

The other day when we were reading some of the poems in "Ionica," I
promised to speak in another short essay of Theocritus and his songs or
idyls of Greek peasant life, but in speaking of him it will be well also
to speak of others who equally illustrate the fact that everywhere there
is truth and beauty for the mind that can see. I spoke last week about
what I thought the highest possible kind of literary art might become. But
the possible becoming is yet far away; and in speaking of some old Greek
writers I want only to emphasize the fact that modern literary art as well
as ancient literary art produced their best results from a close study of
human nature.

Although Theocritus and others who wrote idyls found their chief
inspiration in the life of the peasants, they sometimes also wrote about
the life of cities. Human nature may be studied in the city as well as in
the country, provided that a man knows how to look for it. It is not in
the courts of princes nor the houses of nobles nor the residences of the
wealthy that such study can be made. These superior classes have found it
necessary to show themselves to the world very cautiously; they live by
rule, they conceal their emotions, they move theatrically. But the
ordinary, everyday people of cities are very different; they speak their
thoughts, they keep their hearts open, and they let us see, just as
children do, the good or the evil side of their characters. So a good poet
and a good observer can find in the life of cities subjects of study
almost as easily as in the country. Theocritus has done this in his
fifteenth idyl. This idyl is very famous, and it has been translated
hundreds of times into various languages. Perhaps you may have seen one
version of it which was made by Matthew Arnold. But I think that the
version made by Lang is even better.

The scene is laid in Alex