Lastly, there are a few elderly people who have survived the atmosphere of “the classics,” and yet cherish the idea of Greece as something almost holy in its tremendous power of inspiration. These are the people who are actually pleased when a fragment of Menander is unearthed in an Egyptian rubbish-heap, or a fisherman fishing for sponges off Cape Matapan finds entangled in his net three-quarters of a bronze idol. And they are not all schoolmasters either. Some of them spend their time and money in digging the soil of Greece under a blazing Mediterranean sun. Some of them haunt the auction-rooms and run up a fragment of pottery, or a marble head without a nose, to figures that seem quite absurd when you look at the shabby clothes of the bidders. They talk of Greece as if it were in the same latitude as Heaven, not Naples. The strange thing about them is that though they evidently feel the love of old Greece burning like a flame in their hearts, they find their ideas on the subject quite incommunicable. Let us hope they end their days peacefully in retreats with classical façades, like the Bethlehem Hospital. Admitting something of this weakness, it is my aim here to try and throw some fresh light upon the secret of that people’s greatness, and to look at the Greeks not as the defunct producers of antique curios, but, if I can, as Keats looked at them, believing what he said of Beauty, that “It will never Pass into nothingness, but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”