d manures. There is, I have often maintained, no necessary antagonism
whatever between these intellectual pursuits and the pursuit of art and
literature. One should be but the complement of the other. Goethe and
Shelley could combine the love of both science and poetry. If the
physicist and the artistic creator quarrel, then each is blind in one
mental eye.

Be that as it may, the fact for us just now is that the reading and
learning of those spacious Elizabethan days were such that, with the
brightening of the intellect, there was no dimming of the imagination.
On the contrary, the effect of the recovery and the spread of all the
rich, warm, many-coloured creations of the world's best minds, was to
steep the English nation in enthusiasm for great lyrics, great dramas,
any great production which carried with it the warmth and brightness and
exhilarating breath of noble poetry.

There was no weakening of character in this, no loss of practical
efficiency. A Sidney or a Raleigh could fight as well as turn a verse; a
Shakespeare could prove as sound a man of business as he was a poet.
Elizabethan men were all-round men, like the best men in Periclean
Athens.

Moreover, the recovered classics imparted not only enthusiasm, but
standards. An ambitious writer of the Elizabethan age must do his best
to live up to Homer and Plato, to Virgil and Catullus, just as he must
live up to Petrarch.

And one thing more. When Spenser or Shakespeare or their contemporaries
took up their pens, there was ready to their use the magnificent
Elizabethan English tongue--a store inexhaustibly rich, and all the
richer for being free from huge piles of needless rubbish, called
vocabulary, which modern times have heaped into the long-suffering
dictionary. The speech of the English Bible, which rightly seems to us
so inimitably noble in its simplicity, was but the contemporary speech
of educated England. Fine expressive words had not yet been soiled with
all ignoble use. They had not been debauched by slang or vulgarized by
affectation. The Elizabethan language possessed the noble solid grandeur
of a statue of Phidias or Angelo. At its best now it is apt to pose like
the enervated Apollo Belvedere or an over-refined production of Canova.
Says that vigorous writer, Lowell: "In reading Hakluyt's Voyages, we are
almost startled now and then to find that even common sailors could not
tell the story of their wanderings without rising to an almost Odys