s of
Epictetus: "It is a sign of[Greek: aphuia]," says he,--that is, of a
nature not finely tempered,--"to give yourselves up to things which
relate to the body; to make, for instance, a great fuss about exercise,
a great fuss about eating, a great fuss about drinking, a great fuss
about walking, a great fuss about riding. All these things ought to be
done merely by the way: the formation of the spirit and character must
be our real concern."[400] This is admirable; and, indeed, the Greek
word[Greek: euphuia], a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the
notion of perfection as culture brings us to conceive it: a harmonious
perfection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and
intelligence are both present, which unites "the two noblest of
things,"--as Swift, who of one of the two, at any rate, had himself all
too little, most happily calls them in his _Battle of the Books_,--"the
two noblest of things, _sweetness and light_."[401] The[Greek:
euphuaes] is the man who tends towards sweetness and light; the[Greek:
aphuaes], on the other hand, is our Philistine. The immense spiritual
significance of the Greeks is due to their having been inspired with
this central and happy idea of the essential character of human
perfection; and Mr. Bright's misconception of culture, as a smattering
of Greek and Latin, comes itself, after all, from this wonderful
significance of the Greeks having affected the very machinery of our
education, and is in itself a kind of homage to it.

In thus making sweetness and light to be characters of perfection,
culture is of like spirit with poetry, follows one law with poetry. Far
more than on our freedom, our population, and our industrialism, many
amongst us rely upon our religious organizations to save us. I have
called religion a yet more important manifestation of human nature than
poetry, because it has worked on a broader scale for perfection, and
with greater masses of men. But the idea of beauty and of a human nature
perfect on all its sides, which is the dominant idea of poetry, is a
true and invaluable idea, though it has not yet had the success that the
idea of conquering the obvious faults of our animality, and of a human
nature perfect on the moral side,--which is the dominant idea of
religion,--has been enabled to have; and it is destined, adding to
itself the religious idea of a devout energy, to transform and govern
the other.

The best art and poetry of the Greeks, in whic