When people say that the Thermopylæ epitaph would suit Gallipoli, I rather wonder if they see how very suitable it really is. It is not the namby-pamby thing they think, “Go, tell the Spartans, thou that passest by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.” It really is a stinging thing, and the sting is in the tail, the last word of the line. “Tell the Spartans it was _here_--in an untenable position, with a flank that could be turned--it was _here_ that, in compliance with their orders, our lives were thrown away.” In a list of the books here that were acquired before 1846, the German books are the collected works of Goethe, Schiller, Richter (Jean Paul) and Koerner, as well as separate works of theirs, a few things by Niemeyer, Tieck, Werner and Wilmsen, and some translations into German from the Danish and Swedish of Andersen and Bremer. All this, of course, is what is known as literature; and there is nothing at all utilitarian except a volume of travels in Surinam, published at Potsdam in 1782. The later acquisitions show how Germany has changed since 1846. These books are crammed with information, but devoid of literary merit.--No doubt, the recent books were chosen by myself, and the others by departed relatives whose tastes and interests were not the same as mine; but this will not explain the change. There was not the same scope for choice: there were few books then of such appalling industry as those that come out now, and there has not been another Goethe. It is fifty years since I first travelled in Germany, 1868, and I have watched the later stages of the transformation that had been foretold. “But the Ideal is passing slowly away from the German mind ... and the memories that led their grandsires to contemplate, will urge the youth of the next generation to dare and to act.” Old Bulwer Lytton wrote that in 1834 in his _Pilgrims of the Rhine_. I remember my father reading it out to me in very early years. He had a very dexterous way of giving me glowing accounts of places on the Continent, and making me long to go there. And then, whenever I said that I should like to go, he said to me, “Of course, you shall; but it’s no good your going till you can talk to people there.” I commend that dodge to parents whose children are disinclined to learn. When my brother was at Harrow, my father was dissatisfied at his learning so little German there, but my grandfather took quite another view, 8 February 1863, “I should say, Let him be a proficient in the French language first, for that is spoken nearly all the world over, while German is more a flash thing than useful: all very well, if time permits after learning the more useful. So let him get on with Mathematics and the Classics, for that is what he will gain Honours on (if any) and not the German language: that is merely an accomplishment.”