The influence of a literary work may, however, extend itself far beyond the limits of its own language. When our minds can receive and take pleasure in the conceptions of a great writer, he may speak to us by an interpreter. At the Renascence there were books in the world which might have affected the minds of the young—Plutarch, Herodotus, and above all Homer. But, as I have already said, it was not the conceptions, but the literary form of the ancients, which seemed to the Renascence scholars of such inestimable value, so they refused to give the conceptions in any but the original words. “Studying the ancients in translations,” says Melancthon, “is merely looking at the shadow.” He could not have made a greater mistake. As far as the young are concerned the truth is exactly the reverse. The translation would give the substance: the original can give nothing but the shadow. Let us take the experience of Mr. Kinglake, the author of “Eothen.” This distinguished Eton man, fired by his remembrances of Homer, visited the Troad. He had, as he tells us, “clasped the _Iliad_ line by line to his brain with reverence as well as love.” Well done, Eton! we are tempted to exclaim when we read this passage: here at least is proof that some _literature_ was taught in those days of the dominion of the classics. But stop! It seems that this clasping did not take place at Eton, but in happy days before Eton, when Kinglake knew no Greek and read translations. “Heroic days are these,” he writes, “but the Dark Ages of schoolboy life come closing over them. I suppose it’s all right in the end: yet, by Jove! at first sight it does seem a sad intellectual fall.... The dismal change is ordained and thin meagre Latin (the same for everybody) with small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper’s pall over all your early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile monkish doggrel, grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, horrible odds and ends of dead languages are given you for your portion, and down you fall from Roman story to a three-inch scrap of ‘Scriptores Romani’—from Greek poetry down, down, to the cold rations of ‘Poetæ Græci,’ cut up by commentators and served out by schoolmasters!” (“Eothen,” the Troad.)