antiquity, that raised our Sir Thomas into
wondering admiration:

Lorde god, what incomparable swetnesse of wordes and mater shall
he finde in the saide warkes of Plato and Cicero; wherin is ioyned
grauitie with dilectation, excellent wysedome with diuine
eloquence, absolute vertue with pleasure incredible, and euery
place is so infarced [crowded] with profitable counsaile, ioyned
with honestie, that those thre bokes be almoste sufficient to make
a perfecte and excellent gouernour.

There is no need to dwell on this aspect of the classics. He who cares to
follow their full working in this direction, as did our English humanist,
may find it exhibited in Plato's political and ethical scheme of
self-development, or in Aristotle's ideal of the Golden Mean which
combines magnanimity with moderation, and elevation with self-knowledge.
If a single word were used to describe the character and state of life
upheld by Plato and Aristotle, as spokesmen of their people, it would be
_eleutheria_, _liberty_: the freedom to cultivate the higher part of a
man's nature--his intellectual prerogative, his desire of truth, his
refinements of taste--and to hold the baser part of himself in subjection;
the freedom, also, for its own perfection, and indeed for its very
existence, to impose an outer conformity to, or at least respect for, the
laws of this inner government on others who are of themselves ungoverned.
Such liberty is the ground of true distinction; it implies the opposite of
an equalitarianism which reserves its honors and rewards for those who
attain a bastard kind of distinction by the cunning of leadership, without
departing from common standards--the demagogues who rise by flattery. But
it is, on the other hand, by no means dependent on the artificial
distinctions of privilege, and is peculiarly adapted to an age whose
appointed task must be to create a natural aristocracy as a _via media_
between an equalitarian democracy and a prescriptive oligarchy or
plutocracy. It is a notable fact that, as the real hostility to the
classics in the present day arises from an instinctive suspicion of them
as standing in the way of a downward-levelling mediocrity, so, at other
times, they have fallen under displeasure for their veto on a contrary
excess. Thus, in his savage attack on the Commonwealth, to which he gave
the significant title _Behemoth_, Hobbes lists the reading of classical
history among the chi