we are
valuing Euripides as a poet. In another character, as a philosopher, as
a large capacious thinker, as a master of pensive and sorrow-tainted
wisdom, as a large reviewer of human life, he is as much beyond all
rivalship from his scenic brethren as he is below one of them as a
scenic artist.

Is the Nile ancient? So is Homer. Is the Nile remote and hiding its head
in fable? So is Homer. Is the Nile the diffusive benefactor of the
world? So is Homer.[36]

_The AEneid._--It is not any supposed excellence that has embalmed this
poem; but the enshrining of the differential Roman principle (the grand
aspiring character of resolution), all referred to the central principle
of the aggrandizement of Rome.

The sublime of wrath is nowhere exhibited so well as in Juvenal. Yet in
Juvenal pretty glimpses of rural rest--

'... infans cum collusore catello.'[37]

That is pretty! There is another which comes to my mind and suggests his
rising up and laying aside, etc., and shows it to be an _occasional_
act, and, _ergo_, his garden is but a relaxation, amusement.

Glances which the haughty eyes of Rome threw sometimes gently and
relentingly aside on man or woman, children or the flowers.

Herodotus is as sceptical as Plutarch is credulous. How often is _now_
and _at this time_ applied to the fictitious present of the author,
whilst a man arguing generally beforehand would say that surely a man
could always distinguish between _now_ and _then_.

8.--HISTORICAL, ETC.

_Growth of the House of Commons._--The House of Commons was the power of
the purse, and what gave its emphasis to that power? Simply the growing
necessity of standing forces, and the growing increase of war, so that
now out of twenty millions, fifteen are applied to army and navy.

One great evil, as in practice it had begun to show itself, pressed with
equal injustice on the party who suffered from it (viz., the nation),
and the party who seemed to reap its benefit. This was the fact that as
yet no separation had taken place between the royal peculiar revenue,
and that of the nation. The advance of the nation was now (1603, 1st of
James I.) approaching to the point which made the evil oppression, and
yet had not absolutely reached the point at which it could be undeniably
perceived. Much contest and debate divided the stage of incipient evil
from the stage of confessed grievance. In spending L100,000 upon a
single fete, James I. might reasonab