Let us, indeed, claim with a proper national pride that the influence of English literature, of our Shakespeare, our Bacon, our Locke, our Byron, upon foreign writers has been profound. Her debt to modern literature has been repaid by England, and, at least in the influence of Shakespeare, more than repaid. But with that question we are not here concerned. One prefatory remark has yet to be made. It is that there is no discredit in this literary borrowing. Nations can no more be independent in the art of literature than in other arts. To be independent, to be unaffected by others’ genius, inaccessible to others’ ideas, would be to render our literature as stagnant and as grotesque as the paintings of China and of old Japan. It is a condition of progress in literature as in science, that new inspiration must be continually sought, new conceptions assimilated. One vein is soon worked out; another must be opened. True art is of all the world, and a nation does best in art when it corrects its own peculiar faults and expands its own particular ideas, without meanwhile surrendering itself to a servile imitation of that for which its genius is naturally unfit. And English writers may glory that they have seldom been servile imitators. I GREEK LITERATURE AND ENGLISH Of all the literatures which have contributed to that of England, the Greek is by far the first and most important. The study of Greek literature is the indispensable introduction to the study of European literary history. Whether we review the literature of England, of Italy, of France, or of Germany, it is at Greece that we shall ultimately arrive. Take our English epic, _Paradise Lost_. It is a commonplace that it derives much inspiration from Dante’s _Divine Comedy_. But, when we arrive at the _Divine Comedy_, we are assured that it would never have taken such shape but for Virgil’s _Aeneid_. And, when we come to Virgil’s _Aeneid_, it is a fact known to the veriest tiro that the _Aeneid_ is a copy, and, in a sense, a plagiarism, of Homer’s _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. The pedigree is self-evident and undeniable. Practically it is avowed at every step. Look elsewhere. Pope and Shenstone wrote “pastorals,” after the fashion introduced into English by Spenser. But Spenser himself had been led to this form of composition by the Italian Sannazaro and the Latin Virgil. And, when we reach Virgil, we find that he is a liberal borrower, in matter and manner alike, sometimes even in the very phrase, from the Greek of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus. It is the same with literary criticism. Pope’s _Essay on Criticism_, like Roscommon’s _Essay on Translated Verse_, is derived from Boileau’s French _Art Poétique_. But Boileau is an echo of the Latin Horace and his _De Arte Poetica_, while Horace is himself a borrower from Greeks of Alexandria, and ultimately from Aristotle of Athens. And so it is throughout. Often, especially in these later days, our stars of English literature shine