years the comparative method has created a science of language. The study of manuscripts, as such, has become the science of palaeography; textual criticism is, within certain limits, a science; so is archaeology; or rather it is a group of kindred sciences. All this is excellent; though there are certain tendencies, incidental to this progress, which it is desirable to keep within due bounds. There is some danger, perhaps, lest, under the influence of high specialising, the various departments or sub-departments of classical study should become too much isolated from each other, and the larger view of the humanities should be lost. The other danger is lest the zeal for scientific precision should obscure the nature of the material with which all scholarship has to deal, viz., the creations of the human mind, in language, in literature, or in art. No study, concerned with such material, can attain its highest aim, unless the purely intellectual spirit of science is controlled by the literary and artistic sense, which is partly moral. To hold the balance between them must always be difficult, and is peculiarly difficult in an age like our own. But the rising generation of scholars, the future guardians of the classical tradition, will perhaps do well to heed these things.
Meanwhile, it is a matter for unqualified rejoicing that the study of antiquity has become wider and more real, and is now capable of satisfying a greater diversity of intellectual appetites. The gain here might be illustrated by a typical case,—that of
