PLA. They claim, however, to show taste and discrimination in the adornment of their writings.

LAN. They do: and I allow their claim. But what then? Having discovered new dyes, and having acquired new cunning in the beautiful arrangement of colours, they fail to see that an inordinate passion for the kind of pleasure which such arrangements give is in itself a sin against the continence of Art. A Persian grandee was probably a beautiful sight enough; but if a satrap of Xerxes had apparelled himself as these men bedizen their prose, the king would have beheaded him for his effeminacy.

PLA. You easily dispose, then, of their claim to one of the virtues you have mentioned. They are wanting in manliness.

LAN. They are; and in the simplicity which is seldom found apart from it. As for repose, how in the world can a man remain at rest who is for ever longing to draw attention to the grace of his attitude or the lace of his tunic?

PLA. There is still the virtue of reserve.

LAN. Reserve is restraint, and restraint is painful, and pain is intolerable to the self-indulgent. When did one of these men ever deny his senses the pleasure of a glowing epithet, however more appropriate would have been a colourless and neutral word?

PLA. I cannot, indeed, approve of their manner of discoursing either upon the painter's or upon the sculptor's art.

LAN. Men cannot discourse fitly upon one matter when

they are thinking of another; and these men compose their dissertations not so much to set forth their subject as to display themselves. But it is not from vanity alone that they neglect to castigate their style. An over-coloured diction is the natural product of a too sensuous imagery, and with this they indulge themselves rather for their own gratification than for that of their readers.

PLA. But do they not understand that in this pleasure as in all others, they should observe a rule of temperance?

LAN. No doubt they do, like all other voluptuaries; but they are the least fitted of all men, both in spirit and in training, to resist this species of temptation. They may fancy themselves Greeks to their hearts' content; but in truth they can trace no descent from classical antiquity at all. They are the late-born children of the Renascence, and their only real affinities are with the thoughts, the passions, and the foibles of that unreposeful time. Whatever sincerity there is in them displays itself only in their sympathy with its art, its poetry, its ideas. Their Hellenism is a sham product, redolent of that modern and modish suburb in which its latest festival was held.

PLA. But was there not formerly among you a more sincere culture study of the poetic models of my language? I have heard your countrymen speak of certain older poems inscribed Hellenica.

LAN. Indeed? Then they are better known in the nether world than upon earth. And what, O Plato, was the report of them?

PLA. That life alone was wanting to their beauty; but

that, lacking life, they could not without a paradox be credited with the promise of immortality.

LAN. I need not ask you who said that. I could trace the vapid epigram to a hundred flippant tongues. I doubt not that there were coxcombs who pointed the same dull jest at the Zeus of Phidias. None are so ready to award or deny the palm of immortality to others as those whose wits have rotted before their death. And pray what more did they say of me?

PLA. Of you, my friend? Was it you then who composed the poems of which I spoke? Had I known it, I would have gone more circumspectly. The writings of poets are like children, whose uncomely features are not to be spoken of but with reserve to their parents.

LAN. The simulation of ignorance as a cloak for insult is a modern refinement of malice, and I would never impute it to the courtesy of a Greek, and still less to the gravity of a philosopher. The poems of which you spoke,

O Plato, were my own. worthy of your approbation, but believe me, they were far less so than their censors.

They may well have been un

PLA. You are acquainted then it seems with those who condemned your poems.

LAN. Intimately. Their names were Envy, Ignorance and Vulgarity, three closely-allied enemies of every worthy work and workman in art or letters; and in a semibarbarous society like that of England all other voices are drowned by theirs. I was well aware that in my own lifetime—but why pursue this subject? It is repugnant to me to speak of myself and of my labours; and especially

so when speech may be mistaken for protest against a judgment which I never recognised, and appeal from a tribunal before which I refused to plead. Let us rather speak of the writings of my successors, and of those among them-for there are some such I admit-who have striven to preach the Hellenic worship of perfection to the benighted. Scythians and Persians of my rudely luxurious land.

PLA. Have there then been other Hellenica produced among you?

LAN. Your question proves to me, O Plato, that you mistook the purpose of my poems and lent, perhaps, too ready an ear on that account to the fribbles who condemned them. A direct and avowed imitation of Greek models in a modern tongue can never be more than an elegant exercise of ingenuity. As such, it may succeed or fail. It may simulate life with more or less of cunningthough it will always seem inanimate to those who must be bawled at before they hear, and pummelled to make them feel. It may catch the happy union of the beautiful with the chaste-though its purity will always seem insipid to those who find in the raddled cheek of the courtesan their only ideal of beauty. But it can never live with the life or thrill with the passion of the present; and it is not by such exercises of the literary handicraft that the example of Hellas can be made helpful and inspiring to a modern literature.

PLA. How then would you call it to your aid?

LAN. A certain priest of our religion has told us that the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life. It is by

informing the ideas, the imagery, the expression of the moderns with the Hellenic spirit; it is by cultivating the Hellenic passion for symmetry and balance, the Hellenic pride in continence and self-restraint, the Hellenic delight in pure beauty of form, and the Hellenic contempt for the glare of colour, that the elevation of our literature is to be compassed; and there are some still living, there is one in pre-eminence, by whom this excellent work has been greatly advanced.

PLA. In poetry or in what other species of composition? LAN. In poetry for the most part, though he has endeavoured with less success to inculcate in his prose the precepts which he practises in verse. Has any one ever spoken to you of the Strayed Reveller or of Empedocles on Etna?

PLA. I do not recall those titles; but I have heard many such as a prelude to recitations, together with others far less familiar to me as a Greek than the name of the

Sicilian philosopher. I am indebted indeed to your poets for having enabled me to make the acquaintance of not a few personages famous, it would seem, among the men of your own day, but completely unknown in mine.

LAN. The poet, however, whom I am praising is not one of those who seek to gain a character for erudition by the choice of obscure subjects. He is endowed, moreover, with that saving gift of humour which though it does not indeed save men from vanity, yet insures them against its more ridiculous excesses.

PLA. But are not these poems of your countrymen