hand the clues they followed, the models they used.'

Now I have as you know, Gentlemen, a certain sympathy with this
plea, or with a part of it: nor can so much of truth as its
argument contains be silenced by a 'What about Shakespeare?' or a
'What about Bunyan?' or a 'What about Burns?' I believe our
imaginary pleader for the Classics could put up a stout defence
upon any of those names. To choose the forlornest hope of the
three, I can hear him demonstrating, to his own satisfaction if
not to yours, that Bunyan took his style straight out of the
Authorised Version of our Bible; which is to say that he took it
from the styles of forty-seven scholars, _plus_ Tyndale's, _plus_
Coverdale's, _plus_ Cranmer's--the scholarship of fifty scholars
expressed and blended.

But, as a theory, the strict classical argument gives itself
away, as well by its intolerance as by its obvious distrust of
the genius of our own wonderful language. I have in these five
years, and from this place, Gentlemen, counselled you to seek
back ever to those Mediterranean sources which are the well-heads
of our civilisation: but always (I hope) on the understanding
that you use them with a large liberty. They are effete for us
unless we add and mingle freely the juice of our own natural
_genius._

And in practice the strict classical theory, with its implied
contempt of English, has been disastrous: disastrous not only
with the ordinary man--as with my Sixth Form boy who could not
put two sentences together, and had read no English authors; but
disastrous even to highly eminent scholars. Listen, pray, to this
passage from one of them, Frederick Paley, who condescended
(Heaven knows why) to turn the majestic verse of Pindar into
English Prose--

_From the VIIIth Isthmian:_

And now that we are returned from great sorrows, let us
not fall into a dearth of victories, nor foster griefs; but as
we have ceased from our tiresome troubles, we will publicly
indulge in a sweet roundelay.

_From the IVth Pythian:_

It had been divinely predicted to Pelias, that he should die
by the doughty sons of Aeolus and an alarming oracle had come
to his wary mind, delivered at the central point of tree-clad
mother-earth, 'that he must by all means hold in great caution
the man with one shoe, when he shall have come from a homestead
on the hills.'

And he accordingly came in due time, armed with two spears,
a magnificent man. The dress