life. "To pass from the study of Homer to the business of the world," says Mr Gladstone, "is to step out of a palace of enchantment into the cold grey light of a polar day. But the spells in which this enchanter deals have no affinity with that drug from Egypt which drowns the spirit in effeminate indifference; rather they are like the φάρμακον ἐσθλόν, the remedial specific, which, freshening the understanding by contact with the truth and strength of nature, should both improve its vigilance against deceit and danger, and increase its vigour and resolution for the discharge of duty." The tribute here rendered to Homer might be paid, with not less justice, to the classical Greek poetry as a whole. True to Aristotle's principle for art, this poetry deals with the universal,—with those elements of human character and life which are not transient or abnormal, but of interest for every age and every land.
On the high places, the templa serena, of Greek literature and art, those who are worn with the troubles or disturbed by the mental maladies of modern civilisation can breathe an atmosphere which, like that of Greece itself, has the freshness of the mountains and the sea. But the loneliness of Oeta or Cithaeron is not there; we have around us, on those summits, also the cheerful sympathies of human life, the pleasant greetings of the kindly human voice. The great thinkers and artists of ancient Hellas recall the words in which Aeschylus
