e times, and to do this most effectually he
had better saturate himself to the utmost with its fugitive literature,
reading every scrap he may lay hand on until he can find no more.

Looking at these relics, on the other hand, as pure literature, no doubt
what is recalled out of the past loses the freshness and the fitness to
surrounding conditions which gave it pungency and emphasis in its own
day, while it has not that hold on our sympathies and attachment
possessed by the household literature which generation after generation
has been educated to admire, and which, indeed, has made itself a part
of our method of thought and our form of language. But precisely because
it wants this qualification has resuscitated literature a peculiar value
of its own. It breaks in with a new light upon the intellect of the day,
and its conventional forms and colours. There is not in the intellectual
history of mankind any so effective and brilliant an awakening as the
resuscitation of classical literature. It was not one solitary star
arising after another at long intervals and far apart in space, but a
sudden blazing forth of a whole firmament of light. But that is a
phenomenon to all appearance not to be repeated, or, more correctly
speaking, not to be completed, since it broke up unfinished, leaving the
world in partial darkness. Literature has been ever since wailing the
loss of the seventy per cent of Livy's History, of the eighty per cent
of Tacitus and of Euripides, of the still larger proportion of AEschylus
and Sophocles, of the mysterious triumphs of Menander, and of the whole
apparatus of the literary renown of Varro and of Atticus.[79] What would
the learned world give for the restoration of these things? It may
safely offer an indefinite reward, for so well has its surface been
ransacked for them that their existence is hardly possible, though some
sanguine people enjoy the expectation of finding them in some obscure
back-shelves in the Sultan's library. The literary results of the costly
and skilful scientific process for restoring the baked books found in
Herculaneum were so appallingly paltry, as to discourage the pursuit of
the lost classics. The best thing brought to light during the present
century, indeed, is that Institute of Gaius which cost Angelo Mai such a
world of trouble, and was the glory and boast of his life; but it is not
a very popular or extensively read book after all. The manuscripts that
have been ex