Mill said of it, "does not well admit of being transferred bodily" into modern books, and "has been very imperfectly transferred even piecemeal."
The historical value of the classical literatures is that which arises from their relation to the modern. No one, of course, would now maintain that a knowledge of Greek or Latin is necessary to success in writing English; such a statement could be disproved by a cloud of witnesses,—among others, by Shakespeare, De Foe, Bunyan, Byron, Carlyle, Cobbett, Charles Lamb. But it is certain that no one can comprehend the history and development of English literature, or of any literature of modern Europe, without a knowledge of the ultimate sources in ancient Greece and Italy. Without such a knowledge, the process by which the forms of modern literature have been evolved would be unintelligible. It has been urged, indeed, that for a student of a modern literature the important thing is to know the immediate antecedents of that literature, rather than the more remote; and that, if the student of English literature, for instance, studies Early English, it is needless to trouble him with Greek or Latin. It may be replied, however, that, in the study of modern literary history, the light afforded by the nearer past differs in kind from that which is given by the more distant past. The nearer past will explain details; as a study of Chaucer will give the key to some later forms or usages of the language. But it is necessary to go further back,—in the case of any European literature, it is necessary to go back to ancient Greece
