'Goth!' 'Vandal!' he hears from every side. Break
that storm by dividing it, and he will face its anger. 'Let me be a Goth,'
he mutters to himself, 'but let me not dishonor myself by affecting an
enthusiasm which my heart rejects!'
Ever since the restoration of letters there has been a cabal, an academic
interest, a factious league amongst universities, and learned bodies, and
individual scholars, for exalting as something superterrestrial, and quite
unapproachable by moderns, the monuments of Greek literature. France, in
the time of Louis XIV., England, in the latter part of that time; in fact,
each country as it grew polished at some cost of strength, carried this
craze to a dangerous excess--dangerous as all things false are dangerous,
and depressing to the aspirations of genius. Boileau, for instance, and
Addison, though neither [2] of them accomplished in scholarship, nor
either of them extensively read in _any_ department of the classic
literature, speak every where of the classics as having notoriously, and
by the general confession of polished nations, carried the functions of
poetry and eloquence to that sort of faultless beauty which probably does
_really_ exist in the Greek sculpture. There are few things perfect
in this world of frailty. Even lightning is sometimes a failure: Niagara
has horrible faults; and Mont Blanc might be improved by a century of
chiselling from judicious artists.
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