If, years ago, there had lacked anything to sharpen my suspicion of those fork-bearded professors who derived our prose from the stucco of Anglo-Saxon prose, it would have been their foolish deliberate practice of composing whole pages of English prose without using one word derivative from Latin or Greek. Esau, when he sold his birthright, had the excuse of being famished. These pedants, with a full board, sought frenetically to give it away-- board and birthright. _'So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality'_ --almost, I say, these men had deserved to have a kind of speech more to their taste read over their coffins. VII What, in the next place, can I say of Greek, save that, as Latin gave our fathers the model of prose, Greek was the source of it all, the goddess and genius of the well-head? And, casting about to illustrate, as well as may be, what I mean by this, I hit on a minor dialogue of Plato, the "Phaedrus," and choose you a short passage in Edward FitzGerald's rendering: When Socrates and Phaedrus have discoursed away the noon-day under the plane trees by the Ilissus, they rise to depart toward the city. But Socrates (pointing perhaps to some images of Pan and other sylvan deities) says it is not decent to leave their haunts without praying to them, and he prays: 'O auspicious Pan, and ye other deities of this place, grant to me to become beautiful _inwardly,_ and that all my outward goods may prosper my inner soul. Grant that I may esteem wisdom the only riches, and that I may have so much gold as temperance can handsomely carry. 'Have we yet aught else to pray for, Phaedrus? For myself I seem to have prayed enough.' _Phaedrus_: 'Pray as much for me also: for friends have all in common.' _Socrates_: 'Even so be it. Let us depart' To this paternoster of Socrates, reported more than four centuries before Christ taught the Lord's Prayer, let me add an attempted translation of the lines that close Homer's hymn to the Delian Apollo. Imagine the old blind poet on the beach chanting to the islanders the glorious boast of the little island--how it of all lands had harboured Leto in her difficult travail; how she gave birth to the Sun God; how the immortal child, as the attendant goddesses touched his lips with ambrosia, burst his swaddling bands and stood up, sudden, a god erect: