or only hold up before me in like manner a
book, and you may lead me all round Attica and over the
wide world.'

So they recline and talk, looking aloft through that famous pure
sky of Attica, mile upon mile transparent; and their discourse
(preserved to us) is of Love, and seems to belong to that
atmosphere, so clear it is and luminously profound. It ends with
the cool of the day, and the two friends arise to depart.
Socrates looks about him.

'Should we not, before going, offer up a prayer to these local
deities?'

'By all means,' Phaedrus agrees.

_Socrates_ (praying): 'Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who
haunt this place, grant me beauty in the inward soul, and that
the outward and inward may be at one! May I esteem the wise
to be the rich; and may I myself have that quantity of gold
which a temperate man, and he only, can carry.... Anything
more? That prayer, I think, is enough for me.'

_Phaedrus._ 'Ask the same for me, Socrates. Friends, methinks,
should have all things in common.'

_Socrates._ 'Amen, then.... Let us go.'

Here we have, as it seems to me, a marriage, without impediment,
of wisdom and beauty between two minds that perforce have small
acquaintance with books: and yet, with it, Socrates' confession
that anyone with a book under his cloak could lead him anywhere
by the nose. So we see that Hellenic culture at its best was
independent of book-learning, and yet craved for it.

IV

When our own Literature awoke, taking its origin from the proud
scholarship of the Renaissance, an Englishman who affected it was
scarcely more cumbered with books than our Athenian had been, two
thousand years before. It was, and it remained, aristocratic:
sparingly expensive of its culture. It postulated, if not a slave
population, at least a proletariat for which its blessings were
not. No one thought of making a fortune by disseminating his work
in print. Shakespeare never found it worth while to collect and
publish his plays; and a very small sense of history will suffice
to check our tears over the price received by Milton for
"Paradise Lost." We may wonder, indeed, at the time it took our
forefathers to realise--or, at any rate, to employ--the energy
that lay in the printing-press. For centuries after its invention
mere copying commanded far higher prices than authorship[1].
Writers gave 'authorised' editions to the world sometimes for the
sake of fame, often to justify themselve