the British lion were to be afraid of its whelps.[1] So hackneyed an allusion as to the British lion would now only provoke ridicule. We can hardly doubt that allusions to Marathon and Salamis, though still common, were becoming a joke in the time of Aristophanes. That Demosthenes was able to thrill a judicial assembly with them again[2] testifies to his genius, but does not prove that smaller men could have succeeded by playing upon the same thought.
On the whole, it seems probable, that the best work of men able to write good prose will go even more than it already does into the form of general literature—reviews and newspaper articles. Given a much larger reading public than at present—and State schools are bound to provide this,—and a much lower general level of acquirement and taste than the educated classes of the world have possessed for the last century, it seems inevitable that hand-to-mouth work should meet the essential needs of the generation. No one who considers the admirable results achieved by modern leader-writers and correspondents can doubt that a great deal of supremely good literary power is actually used up in this manner. A hundred years ago an Englishman wanting to be informed about the state of the Continent would have found much better material in Clarke's Travels in Russia, Poland, and Scandinavia; in Moore's Travels in France and Germany; in Beckford's Letters from Spain; and in Brydone's Letters from Sicily, than the Times or the Courier would have given him. At present the current statistics of any Continental country are best learned from a gazetteer
- ↑ "Shall we, who have laid the proud British lion at our feet, now be afraid of his whelps?"—Tyler's Life of Patrick Henry, p. 260.
- ↑ Demosthenes, de Corona, p. 297.
