But “something sealed the mouths of these Evangelists.” It is perhaps not unphilosophical to think that this silence was the price the world had to pay for the confident and magnificent advance which it made under the guidance of the Greek genius. If that genius had been less confident, if it had assumed less cavalierly that no other literature could be worth taking into account, if it had hesitated and faltered about systematising boldly whatever had been produced by itself, and allowing everything else (if anything else existed) to go κατ’ οὖρον, what we have would probably not have been vouchsafed to us. And in that case we should, as probably, never have made up the loss. The estimable but not wise persons who try to make out that the undoubtedly rich and great languages and literatures of Modern Europe can supply substitutes for those of Greece and Rome overlook, ignore, or perhaps are honestly ignorant of, the fact that the very strong points of these modern languages and literatures, their Romantic ebb and flow, their uncertainty, their complaisance to the vagaries of the individual, their lack of logical system and _ordonnance_, make it impossible that they should ever give us the principles of fixity which we find in the Classical tongues. Those of us who, far more by chance and good fortune than by any deliberate and virtuous _proairesis_, happen to be acquainted pretty equally with both Ancient and Modern Literature, know that neither will do alone, but that for the education both of the world at large and of any epoch of it, the Ancient is even more necessary than the Modern.