Effect is the wrong word to use, for we have here no literary trick, but a view of life, which is naturally complete and clearsighted, which is sensitive to the beauty that no evil can destroy, which sees the splendour in tragedy itself, and remembers that though the days of darkness are many it is a pleasant thing for the eyes to behold the sun. This philosophy, implied throughout Greek literature, commends it to many people. Those who disagree with the philosophy will not quarrel with the beauty itself. Hellenism is one of the forces which are continually being buried and re-found, and which, like talismans, have a disturbing power when they fall afresh into human hands. Those who read the literature of the age which rediscovered Greek will see that it brought above all a sense of liberation and expansion. At the Renaissance as in the eighteenth century, Greece found the world in chains, and broke them and threw down the prison walls. The fetters of the two epochs were different, but freedom was brought, at the Renaissance partly, and in the age of Winckelmann entirely, by the vision of beauty which Greece exhibited. Our own age has many chains and knows well the burden of which Goethe spoke. It has multiplied ugliness far faster than beauty, and its writers, prolific, interesting, and thoughtful as they are, do not help it here. It may well find, as other ages have found, in this quality of Greek literature a healing and liberating power. * * * * * English literature is surpassed by none, but its defects or dangers are at points where Greek is strong. Greek simplicity recalls us to the central interests of the human heart. Greek truthfulness is a challenge to see the world as it is and shun the emptiness of mere music, the falsities of rhetoric or sentiment, the incompleteness of writers who, instead of seeing life as a whole, ignore or emphasize a part of it as their own sympathies dictate. Greek beauty is a memorial of an aspect of the universe to which ages of thought are often blind. Greek technique is a lesson in 'form' and a reminder of its place in literature.