tracted from the dirty greedy fingers of the Armenian and
Abyssinian monks, are the most valuable pieces of literature that have
been rescued from the far past. Important light on the early history of
Eastern Christianity will no doubt be extracted from them; but they are
written in those Oriental tongues which are available only to the
privileged few.

[Footnote 79: The applicability of this to Varro has been questioned. It
is a matter in which every one is entitled to hold his own opinion. To
say nothing of the other extant shreds of his writings--and I never
found any one who had anything to say for them--I cannot account even
the De Re Rustica as much higher in literary rank than a Farmers' and
Gardeners' Calendar. No doubt it is valuable, as any such means of
insight into the practical life of the Egyptians or the Phoenicians
would be, even were it less methodical than what we have from Varro. But
this, or other writing like it, will hardly account for his great fame
among contemporaries. Look, for instance, to Cicero at the outset of the
Academics: "Tu aetatem patriae, tu descriptiones temporum, tu sacrorum
jura, tu sacerdotum munera, tu domesticam, tu bellicam disciplinam, tu
sedem regionum et locorum, tu omnium divinarum humanarumque rerum
nomina, genera officia, causas aperuiste: plurimumque poetis nostris
omninoque latinis, et literis luminis attulisti, et verbis: atque ipse
varium et elegans omni fere numero poema fecisti: philosophiamque multis
locis inchoasti--ad impellendum satis, ad edocendum parum." Laudation
could scarcely be pitched in higher tone towards the works of the great
Youatt, or Mr Huxtable's contributions to the department of literature
devoted to manure and pigs. The De Re Rustica, written when its author
was eighty years old, seems to have been about the last of what he calls
his seven times seventy works, and it is natural to suppose that
somewhere in the remaining four hundred and eighty-nine lay the merits
which excited such encomiums. The story about Gregory the Great
suppressing the best of Varro's works to hide St Augustine's pilferings
from them, would be a valuable curiosity of literature if it could be
established.]

Unlikely as the treasures opened by the revival of classic literature
are to be to any extent increased, let us not despise the harvest of our
own home gleaners. They do not find now and then a buried Hamlet, or
Paradise Lost, or Hudibras--though, by the way, the Poe