You and I once had a cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, who, had he
lived, would very certainly have left a brilliant addition to the
lustre of the name he bore. He was born in 1798, and only lived
forty-five years, dying when his powers were leading him to high
fortune in that legal profession which so many of the family have
pursued.
He was a scholar of Eton; a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; he
won the Greek and Latin Odes in 1820, and the Greek Ode again in 1821.
To him, therefore, the classic spirit was inborn, and a training that
omitted the study of Latin and Greek the very negation of education.
He would have had something very trenchant to say of what is now known
as "the modern side." He wrote a very rich and splendid prose, and it
is no fond family partiality that leads me to quote to you his
eloquent and precious defence of the classical languages:--
"I am not one whose lot it has been to grow old in literary
retirement, devoted to classical studies with an exclusiveness
which might lead to an overweening estimate of these two noble
languages. Few, I will not say evil, were the days allowed to me
for such pursuits; and I was constrained, still young and an
unripe scholar to forego them for the duties of an active and
laborious profession. They are now amusements only, however
delightful and improving. For I am far from assuming to understand
all their riches, all their beauty, or all their power; yet I can
profoundly feel their immeasurable superiority in many important
respects to all we call modern; and I would fain think that there
are many even among my younger readers who can now, or will
hereafter, sympathise with the expression of my ardent admiration.
"Greek--the shrine of the genius of the old world; as universal as
our race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, or
indefatigable strength, with the complication and the distinctness
of Nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing
was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian, speaking to the
mind like English; with words like pictures, with words like the
gossamer films of the summer; at once the variety and
picturesqueness of Homer; the gloom and the intensity of Æschylus;
not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, nor fathomed to the
bottom by Plato; not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up
with all its ardours even under the Promethean touch of
Demosthenes!
"And Latin--the voice of empire and of war, of law and of the
state, inferior to its half-parent and rival in the embodying of
passion and in the distinguishing of thought, but equal to it in
sustaining the measured march of history; and superior to it in
the indignant declamation of moral satire; stamped with the mark
of an imperial and despotising republic; rigid in its
construction, parsimonious in its synonyms; reluctantly yielding
to the flowery yoke of Horace, although opening glimpses of
Greek-like splendour in the occasional inspirations of Lucretius;
proved indeed, to the uttermost, by Cicero, and by him found
wanting; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive in its
conciseness; the true language of history, instinct with the
spirit of nations and not with the passions of individuals;
breathing the maxims of the world, and not the tenets of the
schools; one and uniform in its air and spirit, whether touched by
the stern and haughty Sallust, by the open and discursive Livy, by
the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus.
"These inestimable advantages, which no modern skill can wholly
counterpoise, are known and felt by the scholar alone. He has not
failed, in the sweet and silent studies of his youth, to drink
deep at those sacred fountains of all that is just and beautiful
in human language.
"The thoughts and the words of the master-spirits of Greece and of
Rome, are inseparably blended in his memory; a sense of their
marvellous harmonies, their exquisite fitness, their consummate
polish, has sunk for ever in his heart, and thence throws out
light and fragrancy upon the gloom and the annoyance of his
maturer years. No avocations of professional labour will make him
abandon their wholesome study; in the midst of a thousand cares he
will find an hour to recur to his boyish lessons--to reperuse
them in the pleasurable consciousness of old associations, and in
the clearness of manly judgment, and to apply them to himself and
to the world with superior profit.
"The more extended his sphere of learning in the literature of
modern Europe, the more deeply, though the more wisely, will he
reverence that of classical antiquity; and in declining age, when
the appetite for magazines and reviews, and the ten-times repeated
trash of the day, has failed, he will retire, as it were, within a
circle of school-fellow friends, and end his secular studies as he
began them, with his Homer, his Horace, and his Shakespeare."
Ah, what an echo, Antony, every word of this beautiful passage finds in
my own heart, only saddened with the poignant regret that the
necessary business and occupation of the passing years have dulled for
me such unpolished facility, as I may once have possessed, for
perusing my Homer and my Horace!
It is, indeed, rare in these days to find gentlemen as familiar as were
their forebears with Latin and Greek. You, Antony, will probably find
yourself as you grow up in like case with myself, but there will remain
for your unending instruction and delight all the glories of English
literature, to give you a taste for which these few letters of mine are
written, plucking only a single flower here and there from the most
wonderful garden in the world.
Your loving old
G.P.
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