I
I have promised you, Gentlemen, for to-day some observations on
_The Value of Greek and Latin in English Literature_: a mild,
academic title, a _camouflage_ title, so to say; calculated to
shelter us for a while from the vigilance of those hot-eyed
reformers who, had I advertised _The Value of Greek and Latin in
English Life_ might even now be swooping from all quarters of the
sky on a suggestion that these dry bones yet were flesh: for
the eyes I dread are not only red and angry, but naturally
microscopic--and that indeed, if they only knew it, is their
malady. Yet 'surely' groaned patient job, 'there _is_ a path
which the vulture's eye hath not seen!'
You, at any rate, know by this time that wherever these
lectures assert literature they assert life, perhaps even too
passionately, allowing neither the fact of death nor the
possibility of divorce.