If they did not all
share in the services of the temple, all, at least, shared in the
superstition. But, now-a-days, the readers come chiefly from a class of
busy people who care very little for ancestral crazes. Latin they have
heard of, and some of them know it as a good sort of industrious language,
that even, in modern times, has turned out many useful books,
astronomical, medical, philosophical, and (as Mrs. Malaprop observes)
diabolical; but, as to Greek, they think of it as of an ancient mummy: you
spend an infinity of time in unswathing it from its old dusty wrappers,
and, when you have come to the end, what do you find for your pains? A
woman's face, or a baby's, that certainly is not the better for being
three thousand years old; and perhaps a few ears of wheat, stolen from
Pharaoh's granary; which wheat, when sown [1] in Norfolk or Mid-Lothian,
reaped, thrashed, ground, baked, and hunted through all sorts of tortures,
yields a breakfast roll that (as a Scottish baker observed to me) is 'not
just _that_ bad.' Certainly not: not exactly '_that_ bad;' not worse than
the worst of our own; but still, much fitter for Pharaoh's breakfast-table
than for ours.
I, for my own part, stand upon an isthmus, connecting me, at one terminus,
with the rebels against Greek, and, at the other, with those against whom
they are in rebellion. On the one hand, it seems shocking to me, who am
steeped to the lips in antique prejudices, that Greek, in unlimited
quantities, should not secure a limited privilege of talking nonsense.
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