she
must be in the right, as against one who barely knew his own language
and a little Latin. Motte was, therefore, thought by most people to
have come off second best. For, as soon as ever he opened
thus--'Madame, it seems to me that, agreeably to all common sense or
common decorum, the Greek poet should here'----instantly, without
listening to his argument, the intrepid Amazon replied ([Greek:
hypodra idousa]), 'You foolish man! you remarkably silly man!--_that_
is because you know no better; and the reason you know no better, is
because you do not understand _ton d'apameibomenos_ as I do.' _Ton
d'apameibomenos_ fell like a hand-grenade amongst Motte's papers, and
blew him up effectually in the opinion of the multitude. No matter
what he might say in reply--no matter how reasonable, how
unanswerable--that one spell of 'No Greek! no Greek!' availed as a
talisman to the lady both for offence and defence; and refuted all
syllogisms and all eloquence as effectually as the cry of _A la
lanterne!_ in the same country some fourscore years after.

So it will always be. Those who (like Madame Dacier) possess no
accomplishment _but_ Greek, will, of necessity, set a superhuman value
upon that literature in all its parts, to which their own narrow skill
becomes an available key. Besides that, over and above this coarse and
conscious motive for overrating that which reacts with an equal and
answerable overrating upon their own little philological attainments,
there is another agency at work, and quite unconsciously to the
subjects of that agency, in disturbing the sanity of any estimate they
may make of a foreign literature. It is the habit (well known to
psychologists) of transferring to anything created by our own skill,
or which reflects our own skill, as if it lay causatively and
objectively[3] in the reflecting thing itself, that pleasurable power
which in very truth belongs subjectively[3] to the mind of him who
surveys it, from conscious success in the exercise of his own
energies. Hence it is that we see daily without surprise, young ladies
hanging enamoured over the pages of an Italian author, and calling
attention to trivial commonplaces, such as, clothed in plain mother
English, would have been more repulsive to them than the distinctions
of a theologian, or the counsels of a great-grandmother. They mistake
for a pleasure yielded by the author, what is in fact the pleasure
attending their own success in mastering what