Those who have never studied language as the classical languages are studied can scarcely hope to understand how vast is the difference between two educational results; on the one hand, of a painstaking study of that indescribable harmony of thought and word which constitutes style, and, on the other, of that superficial perusal of translations which supplies but coarse notions of the substance, notions as different from those of the scholar as the commercial plaster cast is different from the marble originals of Attic sculpture. Since the Shakespearean time our writers have become more and more scholars in Greek—witness Milton, Gray, Cowper, Shelley, among the poets—till, in our own days, it is difficult to meet with an author eminent either in prose or poetry who has not received a liberal training in the Greek language itself, and thence acquired a care of expression such as Greek models cannot fail to impress. * * * * * It may now be well to take for illustration one or two of the departments of literature—not necessarily of the first consequence—in which our debt to Greek is on the surface. A striking form of Greek composition was the Pindaric Ode. Our English poets from Cowley to Swinburne have shown a marked fondness for this form. Cowley, Congreve, and Gray deliberately affect even the title _Pindaric Ode_, acknowledging the source of their inspiration and avowing the imitativeness of their work. The poet Mason speaks of “a Pindar’s rapture in the lyre of Gray.” Cowley, as has been mentioned already, is called on his tombstone the “English Pindar.” Pope’s _Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day_ is meant to be, even if it does not succeed in being, Pindaric in both shape and spirit. It is full, too, of allusion to things Greek, to the ship Argo, to the underworld, with Phlegethon and Sisyphus and Ixion, to the yellow meads of asphodel, to Orpheus and Eurydice. Dryden’s _Song for St. Cecilia’s Day_ and his _Alexander’s Feast_ are imitations of Pindar and Simonides. Gray’s _Progress of Poesy_ is of the same stamp. When he circulated the poem in manuscript, he called it an “Ode in the Greek manner.” His _Bard_ belongs to the same category. Meanwhile the words which open the _Progress of Poesy_ Awake, Aeolian lyre, awake, And give to rapture all thy trembling strings profess a debt to Aeolis, the country of the lyric Sappho and Alcaeus. We must add Collins and Shelley to the list of those over whom Pindar has exercised his charm. Shelley’s _Ode to Liberty_, with its panegyric stanzas on Athens, is at least as Pindaric as the avowed Pindarics of Gray or Cowley. We have already referred to that rather artificial and not very important form of composition called the “pastoral,” whether it be the “pastoral idyll” or the “pastoral elegy”—an idealizing picture of the shepherd’s life, or an idealistic “shepherd’s lament.” We may here briefly revert to the subject.