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The Position of Classical Studies
but not in harmony with the mind of its ancient people:
""He taught us little; but our soul
Had felt him like the thunder's roll."
The most gifted Englishmen of that period who were really in sympathy with the old Greek genius had no influence in England.
Shelley.Shelley, as might have been expected, was keenly alive to the beauty of Greek literature; he translated
Plato's Symposium and a blending of Plato with
Dante may be felt in his
Epipsychidion; though, when he followed the outlines of Greek form, as in the
Prometheus Unbound and the
Adonais, he wholly transmuted the spirit of his models.
Keats, again, was in much a Greek by instinct, though his style was usually less classical than romantic.
Landor.Walter Savage Landor, born seventeen years before Shelley and twenty before Keats, continued to be active long after those short lives were closed; in his exquisite prose he is a conscious artist, working in the spirit of the classical masters. But these men, and such as these, appealed in their own day only to a few. In the earlier part of this century there arose no new popular force in English literature tending to diffuse a recognition of those merits and charms which belong to the classical ideal. Take, for instance, two great writers who present a sufficiently strong contrast to each other,
CarlyleCarlyle and
Macaulay; Carlyle, both in cast of thought and in form, is anti-classical; while
MacaulayMacaulay, with his intimate knowledge of the classics, his ardent love of them,