Turning to persistence of characteristics, it is superfluous for me to expound to you this topic at any length, for in the book which forms the basis of the old acquaintance between you and me, I mean my _Social Life in Greece_, the main thesis, then, but now no longer, a paradox, was that, though the classical Greeks did great intellectual and artistic work which their descendants could not attempt to rival, yet the moral features of the Homeric, the Alcaic, the Pindaric, the Platonic, the Xenophontic, the Demosthenic Greek were much the same as those of our friends who are now laying claim to Macedonia. There is the same cleverness, not without a special delight in overreaching an opponent, the same diligence, the same genuine patriotism, but also the same undying jealousy of the success of others, the same want of spirituality in religion, the same light esteem for veracity. The models of Phidias and Polycletus, of Scopas and Praxiteles, were doubtless to be found in real life[2]; so were the characters of Plato’s _Dialogues_, and in this consisted the genius of their art and their literature, that they apprehended and perpetuated the ideal, while the average man and average society in Greece formed a standard of cultivated society, high, but by no means perfect. I only mention their average qualities in order to emphasise the fact that I do not stand before you a pedant seeing nothing but the greatness of his favourite study, but as a plain man estimating the history of the past in the light of common-sense.