Another is that the milieu is so different from our own that the imagination when left unguarded is in danger of modernizing ancient life and ancient expression to such an extent as to distort both scenery and actors. This is not questioning the fact that the Greeks and Romans were precisely like us. Their bodies had the same capacities, needs, and passions as ours, their senses received impressions as ours, their brains met problems by the same logical processes as ours, despite the amusing claim of the pragmatists that they are just now teaching the true art of “operational thinking.” In these respects the advanced races seem to have reached full development very far back in prehistoric times, many millenia before Homer. The pseudo-anthropology which a few years ago assumed that the study of Hottentot psychology might be useful to the student of Plato joked itself off the stage. The critics who tried to persuade us that the romantic sentiment came into being less than a thousand years ago seem equally ludicrous now. We need not repeat the egregious error of Spengler in confounding mental capacities with temporary conventions of expression that tried to respond to environmental need. But while granting that human nature was then what it is now, it is important to comprehend the diversity of the customs, fashions, traditions, conventions, and social needs which evoked an appropriate artistic expression that consequently differs from our own. Love and hate doubtless stirred very similar physical sensations in Catullus, in Dante, and in Tennyson, but the words which these three poets used to express those emotions in verses published for their own readers have very different connotations, because the conventions of their respective periods called for a different series of suppressions and revelations. None of the three can be translated directly into the language of any of the others without evoking erroneous impressions. The pagan directness of Catullus’ lines, the Platonic connotations of the _Nuova Vita_, the Christian romanticism of Tennyson are worlds apart, not because the human being changes but because his environment does. The devotees of nudity who know only the idiom of their own day may accuse Thackeray of hypocrisy because they have not learned to translate him; but that is not literary criticism. Those who miss in Latin poetry the delight in the outburst of spring-time song and color common in medieval poetry from north of the Alps have been prone to assume a temperamental lack in the classical poet, whereas the simple explanation may be that in the north spring brings a sense of release that is hardly realized in Latium where roses linger on till January when the new crocuses and wind-flowers start into blossom. The love of the sea was hardly to be expected till seafaring became fairly safe; the discovery of the compass has a place in the history of romanticism. The romantic enthusiasm for rugged mountain