first sod. Go over the great names in literature and art, in philosophy, theology and scripture, in the sciences of history, mathematics, law, government, and you will find Greek giving life and vigor. Even in the newer sciences founded on observation and experience, which have come into being within a century, whenever an observer gets beyond the elementary stage of research and classification, he will resort to Greece for principles and intellectual categories just as he borrows the language of Greece with which to name his discoveries. History shows that every people and every system of education and every house of learning, when it gives up Greek, is headed towards inferiority and decay, but when it turns with fresh endeavor toward Greek it reaches forth to life and to light. Nor is all this surprising or strained. Our civilization was born and grew for centuries in Greece. Our Christianity was early translated into the language of Greece and for centuries spoke and thought chiefly in that tongue. So then in our minds and souls our youth will ever have been Greek, and from Greek must ever come, as it has come in the past, the new blood that will flush with dynamic energy the anemic arteries of cosmos, the world, and of the microcosm, man. XV TRUE PRINCIPLES OF HOMERIC CRITICISM The story of Phidias and his pupil, Alcamenes has often been told. They competed for a prize in sculpture. The statue of Alcamenes was about to be chosen because of its exquisite finish when Phidias objected to any decision until the statues should be put in the high position they were designed to occupy. At once, the opinions of the judges were reversed, for the apparently rough lines of Phidias’s creation stood out in sublime majesty, while the polish of Alcamenes’s was lost when the statues were raised aloft. The story illustrates a splendid rule of art which has often been forgotten in the study of Homer. The epics of Homer were not made for the test-tube and the microscope. They were not made even for readers; they were composed for listeners. Put them on their proper pedestals and the minutiæ revealed by the grammarian’s microscope will be lost in the grand sweep of the story. You would as soon halt Shakespeare’s _Macbeth_ because of the anachronisms, or condemn Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” because of modern masonry in the walls or carpentry in the table, as apply the philological and archeological tests of the higher critics to Homer.