I will mention but one more feature in which Greek poetry had obviously an advantage over modern art of the same kind. Being almost altogether composed, not for a reading, but a listening public, it was closely associated with other arts, especially those of music and dancing, so as to form an essential part of many great public festivals. It was the soul which animated the frame of every national pageant. If a poet laureate nowadays is asked to celebrate a great public occasion by a poem, he writes an ode or an elegy, such as Tennyson’s “Bury the Great Duke, with a nation’s lamentation,” and sends it out to countless readers. The Greek poet, on similar occasions, would have a solemn procession, or a dance, or a scenic display, with appropriate music, to assist him. These environments secured two great qualities, or rather tended to secure them, for we must not assume perfection as a general result in any human product. It secured that the poet would aim at _dignity_, avoiding all mean and trivial topics. It also secured _brevity_, avoiding discursiveness, which is a fault of much modern poetry. Thus Wordsworth’s _Excursion_ would have been intolerable to the poet himself, had he been a Greek, and to come to a more appropriate illustration, the exuberant and unlimited choruses in Mr. Swinburne’s _Atalanta_--otherwise a splendid reflection of Greek tragedy--would not have been tolerated on account of their redundancy, but the poet would have compressed them within such limits as would not put his chorus out of breath, or produce dizziness in his hearers. The production of poetry for local and special public occasions was also a main cause of the use of distinct dialects, which did not become national property till some great work had sanctioned their literary use. Thus the artificial Homeric dialect became the _lingua franca_ of all epic poets, whatever their country or their date, down to the end of old Greek history. Doric choral hymns were adopted by the Attic tragedies and put into the interludes of Attic dialogue. Luckily for us the Greeks wrote phonetically and did not conceal their local speech under the cloak of an artificial and false orthography. Thus the poetry of the nation has come to us in various dialects, but never, except with deliberate dramatic aim at vulgarity,[5] in the mere language of the common people. But I must now abandon these general considerations and turn to the task of showing you, in some famous examples, how Greek poetry, possessing the excellence requisite for a high model, acted upon the greatest and best of our own poets, as well as on others in modern Europe.