FOOTNOTES:
[3] For the sort of textbook from which the student who is a candidate for "honours in English" will be required to get his knowledge of this poem, see infra, the review of the Clarendon Press Edition of Shelley's Adonais.
[4] The Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, one of the chief legislators for the new School, thinks otherwise, and we should like to place the following passage on record. In his extraordinary History of English Prose (p. 485) he writes thus: "The idea that English literature rests upon a classical basis has been formulated and industriously circulated as the watchword of a pedantic faction, and hardly any organ of current literature has proved itself strong enough, or vigilant enough, to secure itself against the insidious entrance of the above indoctrination." And so it comes to pass that we read in the account of the debate in Congregation, on the occasion of the former attempt to establish this School:—
"The proposal to add the Professors of Greek and Latin to the Board of Studies was rejected by thirty-eight votes to twenty-four, Professor Earle maintaining that the fallacious notion that English literature was derived from the classics was so strong that it was unwise to place even the Professor of Latin on the Board."—Times, May 26, 1887.
και μην πεπωκως γ', ὡς θρασυνεσθαι πλεον,
βροτειον αιμα, κωμος εν δομοις μενει
δυσπεμπτος εξω ξυγγονων Ερινυων.
—Agamem., 1159-61.
[6] For ample illustration of this, see infra the review of the Clarendon Press edition of Shelley's Adonais.
[7] They may all be found in full in a Pall Mall "Extra" (January, 1887), and in the present writer's Study of English Literature.
[8] It is amusing to notice how carefully the greater part of what is most precious and instructive in Johnson's work, the lives namely of Cowley and Dryden, and the noble critique of Paradise Lost, is expressly excluded, and the greater part of what is most trivial, and regarded by himself as trivial, the lives of the minor poets of the eighteenth century, selected instead. Macaulay ranks the lives of Cowley and Dryden, with that of Pope, as the masterpieces of the work; and Johnson himself considered the life of Cowley to be the best.