rhaps on a par for originality.
But if the Greek impulse had touched and wakened Rome under
the aegis of Pythagoreanism,--Rome might have become, possibly,
as fine a thing as Japan. True, the Crest-Wave had to roll
in to Rome presently, and to raise up a great literature
there. But whose is the greatest name in it? A Gaul's, who
imitated Greek models. There is something artificial in the
combination; and you guess that whatever most splendid effort
may be here, the result cannot be supreme. The greatest name in
Latin prose, too,--Livy's--was that of a Gaul.

And herefrom we may gather what mingling of forces is needed to
produce the great ages and results in literature. You have a
country; a tract of earth with the Earth-breath playing up
through the soil of it; you have the components or elements of a
race mixed together on that soil, and molded by that play of the
Earth-breath into homogeneity, and among them, from smallest
beginnings in folk-verse, the body of a literature must grow up.
Then in due season it must be quickened: on the outer plane by
an impulse from abroad,--intercourse with allies, or resistance
to an invader; and on the inner, by an inrush of Crest-Wave
egos. There must be that foreign torch applied,--that spark of
inter-nationalism; and there must be the entry of the vanguard
of the Host of Souls with its great captains and marshals,
bringing with them, to exhibit once more in this world, the loot
of many lands and ages and old incarnations; which thing they
shall do through a sudden efflorescence of the literature that
has grown up slowly to the point of being ready for them. Such
natural growth happened in Greece, in China; in our own cycle,
in France, Italy, England: where the trees of the nation
literatures received buddings and manurings from abroad, but
produced always their own natural national fruit:--Shakespeare
was your true English apple, grown from the Chaucer stock;
although in him flower for juices the sweetness and elixir of all
the world and the ancient ages. But in Rome, before the stock
was more than a tiny seedling, a great branch of Greece was
grafted on it,--and a degenerate Greece at that--and now we do
not know even what kind of fruit-tree that Roman stock should
have grown to be.

How, then, did this submersion and obliteration of the Roman soul
come to pass? It is not difficult to guess. Greek meant
culture: if you wanted culture you learnt Greek. All edu