Some there are, however, who look upon all these new things as being
intensely old. Yet, surely the railroads are new? No; not at all. Talus,
the iron man in Spenser, who continually ran round the island of Crete,
administering gentle warning and correction to offenders, by flooring them
with an iron flail, was a very ancient personage in Greek fable; and the
received opinion is, that he must have been a Cretan railroad, called The
Great Circular Coast-Line, that carried my lords the judges on their
circuits of jail-delivery. The 'Antigone,' again, that wears the freshness
of morning dew, and is so fresh and dewy in the beautiful person of Miss
Faucit, had really begun to look faded on the Athenian stage, and even 'of
a certain age,' about the death of Pericles, whose meridian year was the
year 444 before Christ. Lastly, these modern _readers_, that are so
obstinately rebellious to the once Papal authority of Greek, they--No; on
consideration, they _are_ new. Antiquity produced many monsters, but
none like _them_.
The truth is, that this vast multiplication of readers, within the last
twenty-five years, has changed the prevailing character of readers. The
minority has become the overwhelming majority: the quantity has disturbed
the quality. Formerly, out of every five readers, at least four were, in
some degree, classical scholars: or, if _that_ would be saying too
much, if two of the four had 'small Latin and less Greek,' they were
generally connected with those who had more, or at the worst, who had much
reverence for Latin, and more reverence for Greek.
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