And yet Doctor Washington asserts, to one audience after another, that those glorious achievements of the Latins, the Italians, these imperishable and ever potent achievements of a thousand years, are exceeded by what the negroes have done in thirty years!
From the Latin England took her religious organization, as Germany and Austria and France had done. Through the Latin the classic literature of Greece and earlier Rome came into the modern world—an eternal debt which we owe mainly to Petrarch.
The Bourbon kings imported from Italy the architects, painters, sculptors, landscape gardeners, who laid upon uncouth feudal France the rich mantle of Italian beauty.
It was the Latin who taught modern Europe how to farm, how to irrigate, how to engrave, how to make paper from rags, how to bridge the rivers, how to pave the streets, how to make canals.
Some of Shakespeare’s plays are elaborations and dramatizations of Italian novellas. Chaucer, the father of English poetry, frankly copied from the Italian model.
Milton had Dante for pioneer, Spenser had Ariosto, and Byron’s best work is in the Italian form.
I presume, Doctor, that at this season of the year you are copying the style of the white man, and that you are wearing a straw hat.
Well, the Latins taught us how to make straw hats.
I presume that you recognize the value of glass—one of whose hundreds of uses is to show you how you look.
Well, the Latin taught us how to make glass.