Reclining and looking up into that sky which is not too grandiose an image for our own English Literature, you would certainly not wish, Gentlemen, to see it as what it is not—as a cloth painted on the flat. No more than you would choose the sky overarching your life to be a close, hard, copper vault, would you choose this literature of ours to resemble such a prison. I say nothing, for the moment, of the thrill of comparing ours with other constellations—of such a thrill as Blanco White's famous sonnet imagines in Adam's soul when the first night descended on Eden and

Hesperus with the host of heaven came,
And lo! Creation widen'd in man's view.
Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'd
Within thy beams, O sun!…

No: I simply picture you as desiring to realise our own literature, its depths and values, mile above mile deeper and deeper shining, with perchance a glimpse of a city celestial beyond, or at whiles, on a ladder of values, of the angels—the messengers—climbing and returning.

V

Well, now, I put it to you that without mental breeding, without at least some sense of ancestry, an Englishman can hardly have this perception of value, this vision. I put to you what I posited in an earlier course of lectures, quoting Bagehot, that while a knowledge of Greek and Latin is not necessary to a writer of English, he should at least have a firm conviction that those two languages existed. I refer you to a long passage which, in one of those lectures, I quoted from Cardinal Newman to the effect that for the last 3000 years the Western World has been evolving a human society, having its bond in a common civilisation—a society to which (let me add, by way of footnote) Prussia today is firmly, though with great difficulty, being tamed. There are, and have been, other civilisations in the world —the Chinese, for instance; a huge civilisation, stationary, morose, to us unattractive; 'but this civilisation,' says Newman, 'together with the society which is its creation and its home, is so distinctive and luminous in its character, so imperial in its extent, so imposing in its duration, and so utterly without rival upon the face of the earth, that the association may fitly assume for itself the title of "Human Society," and its civilisation the abstract term "Civilisation".'

He goes on:

Looking, then, at the countries which surround the
Mediterranean Sea as a whole, I see them to be, from time
immemorial, the seat of an association of intellect and mind
such as deserves to be called the Intellect and Mind of the
Human Kind.

But I must refer you to his famous book "The Idea of a
University" to read at length how Newman, in that sinuous,
sinewy, Platonic style of his, works it out—the spread, through
Rome, even to our shores, of the civilisation which began in
Palestine and Greece.

VI

I would press the point more rudely upon you, and more particularly, than does Newman. And first, for Latin—