Pass onward for some generations, till we come to the days of Pope and Addison. The study of Greek is more careful and more widely spread, its history and mythology have dropped into truer perspective and proportion. Greek life, Greek thought, are somewhat better comprehended, though still far from well. Much that the Greeks have written has now become general property. Better still, criticism is alert. The principles of the Greeks have passed, in a garbled form, it is true, through Rome to France, from France to England. The English have awakened to the fact that what deserves to be said at all deserves to be said concisely and precisely. So far, so good. Perhaps we do not profoundly admire the spirit of the literature of the age of Pope and Addison. But we must perforce admire its great advance in polish of expression. As literature, it may fail from want of ideas, from thinness of its substance. In that respect it departs as far from the Greek ideal as it approaches near the Greek ideal in skill of execution. The aim of Greek literature is to express thought or feeling perfectly. But there must be a real thought or a real feeling to express. And this spontaneousness or compelling sincerity the school of Pope and Addison did not, in the main, possess. Yet it did invaluable work. It furnished a later generation, which had ideas and was not ashamed of feelings, with an improved conception of expression. The “Classical” school these writers have been called, but classical they distinctly are not, for to be classical is to express matter of sterling worth in a style for ever fresh. To utter brilliantly a nothing, an artificiality, or a commonplace, is not classical. The Queen Anne and early Georgian school, then, so far as Greek literature is concerned, owe to it sundry healthy principles of style, not yet properly assimilated; they owe many allusions, better ordered and digested than in Spenser or Chaucer; but of its higher thoughts and deeper imaginings they exhibit little influence.