' But there
it is, and it has haunted our literature; at first filtering
through Latin, at length breaking from Constantinople in flood
and led to us, to Oxford and Cambridge, by Erasmus, by Grocyn:
Thee, that lord of splendid lore
Orient from old Hellas' shore.
To have a sense of Greek, too, is to own a corrective of taste. I
quote another old schoolmaster here--a dead friend, Sidney Irwin:
What the Greeks disliked was extravagance, caprice,
boastfulness, and display of all kinds.... The Greeks _hated_ all
monsters. The quaint phrase in the "Odyssey" about the Queen
of the Laestrygones--'She was tall as a mountain, and they
hated her'--would have seemed to them most reasonable....
To read Greek is to have a perpetual witness to the virtue
of pruning--of condensing--a perpetual protest against all
that crowds, and swells, and weakens the writer's purpose.
To forget this is but to 'confound our skill in covetousness.'
We cannot all be writers .
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