The late M. Thiers, when Mr Nassau Senior asked him, "Do you place Racine above Shakespeare?" replied that he only knew Shakespeare through translations, but that he did place Racine above Homer and Virgil! And admirers of Pindar may be consoled by remembering that the critic who dealt so severely with the Theban poet was no kinder to Shakespeare. "He has spoiled the taste of the [English] nation. He has been their taste for two hundred years; and what is the taste of a nation for two hundred years will be so for two thousand."[1]
The judgment of competent students will scarcely endorse the scornful criticism of Voltaire. Yet it must be owned that a modern reader, plunging without special preparation upon a study of Pindar's Odes, will be not unlikely to find himself, for a time at least, in sympathy with it. To appreciate Pindar, it is necessary to lay aside prejudices, to be prepared for surprises, and to hesitate before forming opinions fixed beyond the possibility of future modification. It is necessary, also, to have some preliminary notion of the ideas, the tastes, and the modes of life of those for whom he wrote. Undoubtedly, if his poems deserve immortality, this will be due to qualities in them independent of the accidents of time and place,—to their power of touching sympathies and appealing to instincts which are common to all men of adequate culture in every age and in every nation. But the surroundings of a poem are apt to distract attention from its deeper poetic qualities. And the latter, in the case of a poet
