described those kinsmen of Niobe who worshipped their ancestral deity on the mountain-heights of Mysia—
"the seed of gods,
Men near to Zeus; for whom on Ida burns,
High in clear air, the altar of their sire,
Nor hath their race yet lost the blood divine."
Humanity cannot afford to lose out of its inheritance any part of the best work which has been done for it in the past. All that is most beautiful and most instructive in Greek achievement is our permanent possession; one which can be enjoyed without detriment to those other studies which modern life demands; one which no lapse of time can make obsolete, and which no multiplication of interests can make superfluous. Each successive generation must learn from ancient Greece that which can be taught by her alone.
Through what channels, in what modes, has her teaching been most largely operative upon the world? History shows how, from the Roman age to our own, Greece has everywhere helped to educate gifted minds, from which her light has radiated in ever widening circles. It has been her privilege to elicit a sense of kinship in the finer spirits of every race, and to enter as a vitalising essence into the most varied forms of modern thought, bringing to every such alliance some distinction which no other element could have conferred. But the peculiar characteristic of this influence among us in recent years is the vast increase in the number of those
