high, and to approach the bright fountains of the ancient wisdom,—et purum antiquae lucis adire iubar; to her he owes whatever he has achieved, and from her he asks a final resting-place.
Yes, to such men the humanities had been a true culture; but the social sphere within which they gave that culture had been, as I have said, limited. And in the earlier years of this century there arose in English letters no popular force tending to spread a recognition of the humanistic ideal. In our imaginative literature the most potent forces, those which exerted the widest influence, were then on the side of the romanticists. The genius of Walter Scott was of course essentially romantic; so, too, was that of Byron, his interest in Greece notwithstanding. Only a very limited audience was in those days commanded by the writers whose genius had a native kinship with the classical, such as Keats and Landor. But a little later came Tennyson, whose influence throughout the English-speaking world has made strongly for an appreciation of the classical spirit, not only directly, through his poems on classical themes, but also generally, by his qualities of form and style. And the influence of Matthew Arnold, both as a poet and as a critic, if less widely popular than Tennyson's, has had a not less penetrating and subtle power in making the Greek spirit, and the distinctive qualities of the best Greek achievement, understood and felt by cultivated readers. Then, in the domain of history, Grote's great work,
