has had the power to pierce me
through and transport me."

In the best sense of the word, books are popular philosophy. All
cannot study the deepest problems of life or of science for themselves,
but all can absorb the quintessence of thought in the pleasant and
stimulating form in which it is served up in the best literature.
Books accustom men to take pleasure in ideas and to cultivate a high
and noble inward life. This, their supreme value for the moulding of
character, was appreciated in the sixteenth century. "We must drink
the spirit of the classics," observes Montaigne, "rather than learn
their precepts," and again, "the use to which I put my studies is a
practical one--the formation of character for the exigencies of life."

[Sidenote: Ancient masters of literary style]

This is the service by which the ancients have put the moderns in their
debt. Another gift of distinct, though lesser value, was that of
literary style. So close is the correspondence between expression and
thought that it is no small advantage to any man or to any age to sit
at the feet of those supreme masters of the art of saying things well,
the Greeks. The danger here was from literal imitation. Erasmus, with
habitual wit, ridiculed the Ciceronian who spent years in constructing
sentences that might have been written {578} by his master, who speaks
of Jehovah as Jupiter and of Christ as Cecrops or Iphigenia, and who
transmutes the world around him into a Roman empire with tribunes and
augurs, consuls and allies. It is significant that the English word
"pedant" was coined in the sixteenth century.

What the classics had to teach directly was not only of less value than
their indirect influence, but was often positively harmful. Those who,
intoxicated with the pagan spirit, sought to regulate their lives by
the moral standards of the poets, fell into the same error, though into
the opposite vices, as those who deified the letter of the Bible. Like
the Bible the classics were, and are, to some extent obstacles to the
march of science, and this not only because they take men's interest
from the study of nature, but because most ancient philosophers from
the time of Socrates spoke contemptuously of natural experiment and
discovery as things of little or no value to the soul.

If for the finer spirits of the age a classical education furnished a
noble instrument of culture, for all too many it was prized simply as a
badge of super