For the attack is made in total ignorance of the relative value of the topics assailed. Anyone with the smallest insight into the matter knows full well that the loss of Latin is as nothing compared to that of Greek. I am not going to argue that question before the present audience. If at least three quarters of the good we get from Latin is because Latin civilisation is based on Greek, is it not infinitely better to study the great original than any copy, however successful? And this brings us to the point for the sake of which I have made an apparent digression. Quite apart from the scientists (a very plebeian, but expressive, modern term) who pretend that Latin is sufficient for the department of language or the study of grammar, or of ancient history, we hear a great many, both in England and in America, who are really fond of higher cultivation, who feel obscurely that it is from Greek that such cultivation comes, and who long to obtain from it what they find lacking in modern refinement. But they strive to do this merely through second-hand sources. They have recourse to English translations and English commentaries and to lectures like the present, in order to fill up the gap which they feel in their own early training. Now I will not deny that modern translations are far more faithful than those of more independent imitators, who were not afraid to colour Greek art with hues from their own palette. I will not deny that the skill of the photographer has reproduced for us the outlines of buildings and statues far more accurately than the best of painters, albeit Turner’s conception of Pæstum (for example) is truer in its own way than all the photographs ever taken of that temple. But this brings me to state a somewhat subtle truth, of the greatest import in the present context; a great original is generally susceptible of divers interpretations, whereas a copy, however excellent, seldom gives us more than one; so that, while the former is eminently suggestive, the latter limits our appreciation. The copy of a copy, in law worthless, is so also in matters of art. In each reproduction something is lost, and remember that the more minutely careful the copying, the more slavish is the work likely to be. I know that there are such things as copies greater than their originals. That is true of the Gospels in our English Bible; it is also true of those portions of Virgil’s _Georgics_ which are translated from Aratus. But these rare exceptions do not invalidate the general truth of the principle I have enounced. And when even Virgil, probably the most competent translator that ever lived, came to deal with a master like Theocritus, how feeble the result! I may safely say that if we had no knowledge of Theocritus save through Virgil’s _Eclogues_, he would never have ranked as more than a third-rate poet with us.