a moment how nearly Homer and Herodotus are read alike by us. For Homer's world was from the first imagined, not actual; yet the actual world of the fifth century B.C. has become for us now no less an ideal, perhaps one which is even more stimulating and more fascinating. How far this may be due to any inherent excellence of its own, how far to the subtle enchantment of association, does not affect this argument. Of histories no less than of poems is it true that the best are but shadows, and that, for the highest purposes which history serves, the idea is the fact; the impression produced on us, the heightening and ennobling influence of a life, ideal or actual, akin to and yet different from ours, is the one thing which primarily matters. And so it may be questioned whether so far as this, the vital part of human culture, is concerned, modern scholarship has helped men beyond the point already reached by the more imperfect knowledge and more vivid intuitions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; for if the effect produced on them, in the way of heightening and ennobling life, was more than the effect now and here produced on us, we have, so far as the Greek world is concerned, lost and not gained. Compensations indeed there are; a vast experience has enlarged our horizon and deepened our emotion, and it would be absurd to say now, as was once truly and plausibly said, that Greek means culture. Yet even now we could ill do without it; nor does there seem any reason beyond the dulness of our imagination and the imperfection of our teaching why it should not be as true and as living a help as ever in our lives.