But to proceed to details. Conceive the qualifications of an interpreter and critic of English Literature, a graduate in Honours in his subject, whose education has proceeded on the hypothesis that he need have no acquaintance with the classics of Greece and Rome. Would any competent scholar deny that the history of English Literature, in its mature expression, is little less than the history of the modifications of native genius and characteristics by classical influence, that the development and peculiarities of our epic, dramatic, elegiac, didactic, pastoral, much of our lyric, of our satire and of other species of our poetry is, historically speaking, unintelligible without reference to ancient classical literature? That what is true of our poetry is true of our criticism, of our oratory, sacred and secular, of our dialectic and epistolary Literature, of our historical composition, of the greater part, in short, of our national masterpieces in prose? What, indeed, the Literature of Greece was to that of Rome, the Literatures of Greece and Rome have been to ours.[4] It was the influence of Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Menander, Diphilus, which transformed the _Ludi Scenici_ and the Atellan farces into the tragedies of Ennius and Pacuvius and the comedies of Plautus and Terence. It was the influence of the Roman drama and of a drama modelled on the Roman which transformed, so far at least as structure and style are concerned, our similarly rude native experiments into the tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare. On the epics of Greece were modelled the epics of Rome, and on the epics of Greece and Rome are modelled our own great epics. Of our elegiac poetry, to employ the term in its conventional sense, one portion is largely indebted to Theocritus, Moschus, and Virgil, and another to Catullus and Ovid. Almost all our didactic poetry is modelled on the didactic poetry of Rome. Theocritus and Virgil have furnished the archetypes for our eclogues and pastorals. One important branch of our lyric poetry springs directly from Pindar, another important branch directly from Horace, another directly from the choral odes of the Attic dramatists and of Seneca. Our heroic satire, from Hall to Lord Lytton, is simply the counterpart--often, indeed, a mere imitation--of Roman satire. And if this is true of our satire, it is equally true of our best ethical poetry. The Epistles, which fill so large a space in the poetical literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, derive their origin from those of Horace. To the _Heroides_ of Ovid we owe a whole series of important poems from Drayton to Cawthorn. The Greek anthology and Martial have furnished the archetypes of our epigrams and of our epitaphs. It is the same with our prose. The history of English eloquence begins from the moment when the Roman classics moulded and coloured our style, when periodic prose was modelled on Cicero and Livy,