heless, I admit that sometimes, if not particularly
busy, I stop at a second-hand bookstall and turn over a book or two from
mere force of habit.

I know not what made me pick up a copy of AEschylus--of course in an
English version--or rather I know not what made AEschylus take up with
me, for he took me rather than I him; but no sooner had he got me than he
began puzzling me, as he has done any time this forty years, to know
wherein his transcendent merit can be supposed to lie. To me he is, like
the greater number of classics in all ages and countries, a literary
Struldbrug, rather than a true ambrosia-fed immortal. There are true
immortals, but they are few and far between; most classics are as great
impostors dead as they were when living, and while posing as gods are,
five-sevenths of them, only Struldbrugs. It comforts me to remember that
Aristophanes liked AEschylus no better than I do. True, he praises him
by comparison with Sophocles and Euripides, but he only does so that he
may run down these last more effectively. Aristophanes is a safe man to
follow, nor do I see why it should not be as correct to laugh with him as
to pull a long face with the Greek Professors; but this is neither here
nor there, for no one really cares about AEschylus; the more interesting
question is how he contrived to make so many people for so many years
pretend to care about him.

Perhaps he married somebody's daughter. If a man would get hold of the
public ear, he must pay, marry, or fight. I have never understood that
AEschylus was a man of means, and the fighters do not write poetry, so I
suppose he must have married a theatrical manager's daughter, and got his
plays brought out that way. The ear of any age or country is like its
land, air, and water; it seems limitless but is really limited, and is
already in the keeping of those who naturally enough will have no
squatting on such valuable property. It is written and talked up to as
closely as the means of subsistence are bred up to by a teeming
population. There is not a square inch of it but is in private hands,
and he who would freehold any part of it must do so by purchase,
marriage, or fighting, in the usual way--and fighting gives the longest,
safest tenure. The public itself has hardly more voice in the question
who shall have its ear, than the land has in choosing its owners. It is
farmed as those who own it think most profitable to themselves, and small
blame