To measure the condition of Greek literature even in Cambridge, about the initial period of Coleridge, we need only look back to the several translations of Gray's _Elegy_ by three (if not four) of the reverend gentlemen at that time attached to Eton College. Mathias, no very great scholar himself in this particular field, made himself merry, in his _Pursuits of Literature_, with these Eton translations. In that he was right. But he was _not_ right in praising a contemporary translation by Cook, who (we believe) was the immediate predecessor of Porson in the Greek chair. As a specimen of this translation, [Footnote: It was printed at the end of Aristotle's _Poetics_, which Dr. Cook edited.] we cite one stanza; and we cannot be supposed to select unfairly, because it is the stanza which Mathias praises in extravagant terms. "Here," says he, "Gray, Cook, and Nature, do seem to contend for the mastery." The English quatrain must be familiar to every body:-- "The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike the inevitable hour: The paths of glory lead but to the grave." And the following, we believe, though quoting from a thirty-three years' recollection of it, is the exact Greek version of Cook:-- 'A charis eugenon, charis a basilaeidos achas Lora tuchaes chryseaes, Aphroditaes kala ta dora, Paith ama tauta tethiake, kai eiden morsimon amar Proon kle olole, kai ocheto xunon es Adaen.' Now really these verses, by force of a little mosaic tesselation from genuine Greek sources, pass fluently over the tongue; but can they be considered other than a _cento_? Swarms of English schoolboys, at this day, would not feel very proud to adopt them. In fact, we remember (at a period say twelve years later than this) some iambic verses, which were really composed by a boy, viz., a son of Dr. Prettyman, (afterwards Tomline,) Bishop of Winchester, and, in earlier times, private tutor to Mr. Pitt; they were published by Middleton, first Bishop of Calcutta, in the preface to his work on the Greek article; and for racy idiomatic Greek, self-originated, and not a mere mocking-bird's iteration of alien notes, are so much superior to all the attempts of these sexagenarian doctors, as distinctly to mark the growth of a new era and a new generation in this difficult accomplishment, within the first decennium of this century. It is singular that only one blemish is suggested by any of the contemporary critics in Dr. Cook's verses, viz., in the word _xunon_, for which this critic proposes to substitute _ooinon_, to prevent, as he observes, the last syllable of _ocheto_ from being lengthened by the _x_. Such considerations as these are necessary to the _trutinæ castigatio_, before we can value Coleridge's place on the scale of his own day; which day, _quoad hoc_, be it remembered, was 1790.