A second grand trait of English literature that is writ large on these title-pages, is its enormous assimilative power. So great is this that he who would know English must be a scholar in all literatures, and that with no shallow learning. The old figure of the torch handed down from nation to nation, as the type of man's higher life, gives up its full meaning only to the student, and to him it may come to seem that the torch is all and the hand that bears it dust and ashes; often he finds in its light only the color of his own studies, and names it Greek, Semitic, Hindu, and looks on English, French and Latin as mere carriers of the flame. In so old a symbol there must be profound truth, and it conveys the sense of antiquity in life, of the deathlessness of civilization, and something also of its superhuman origin--the divine gift of fire transmitted from above; but civilization is more than an inheritance, it is a power; and truth is always more than it was; and wherever the torch is lit, its light is the burning of a living race of men. The dependence of the present on the past, of a younger on an older people, of one nation on another, is often misinterpreted and misleads; life cannot be given, but only knowledge, example, direction--influence, but not essence; and the impact of one literature upon another, or of an old historic culture upon a new and ungrown people, is more external than is commonly represented. The genius of a nation born to greatness is irresistible, it remains itself, it does not become another. The Greeks conquered Rome, men say, through the mind; and Rome conquered the barbarians through the mind; but in Gibbon who finds Greece? and the mind of Europe does not bear the ruling stamp of either Byzantine or Italian Rome. In the narrowly temporal and personal view, even under the overwhelming might of Greece, Virgil remained, what Tennyson calls him, "Roman Virgil"; and in the other capital instance of apparently all-conquering literary power, under the truth that went forth from Judea into all lands, Dante remained Italian and Milton English. Yet in these three poets, whose names are synonyms of their countries, the assimilated element is so great that their minds might be said to have been educated abroad.