when analytic prose was modelled on Sallust, Seneca, and Tacitus. With the exception of fiction, there is no important branch of our prose composition, the development and characteristics of which are historically intelligible without reference to the ancients. How radically inadequate must any study of the principles of criticism be, which has no reference to the critical works of the Greek and Roman writers, is obvious. But it is not merely in tracing the development and explaining the peculiarities generally of our prose and of our poetry that competent classical scholarship is indispensable. Is it not notorious that in each generation, from Spenser to Tennyson, from More to Froude, our leading poets and prose writers have been, with very few exceptions, men nourished on classical literature and saturated with its influence? Many entire masterpieces, much, and in some cases the greater portion, of other masterpieces, particularly in our poetry, are simply unintelligible--we are speaking, of course, of serious critical students--except to classical scholars. Take, for example, the _Faerie Queen_, and the _Hymns_ of Spenser, Milton’s _Paradise Lost_, _Comus_, _Lycidas_, and _Samson Agonistes_, Pope’s satires, the two great odes of Gray, Collins’s odes to _Fear_ and the _Passions_, Wordsworth’s great _Ode_ and his _Laodamia_, Shelley’s _Adonais_ and _Prometheus Unbound_, Landor’s _Hellenics_, much of the poetry of Tennyson, Browning, and Matthew Arnold. Indeed it would be as preposterous to attempt any critical study of our Literature, without reference to the ancients, as it would be for a man to set up as an interpreter in Roman Literature without reference to the Greek.