These criticisms will, I trust, console you when I add that I have no time left for a full consideration of the _Poetic_. It is not always given to those who do great work to expound how they did it. Even among the Greeks there was a current theory that the poet suffered under that divine madness which we call inspiration, and knew not the full force of what the Muse spoke through his lips. That this inspiration did not dispense with careful preparation, with elaborate metrical perfection, I have already told you. We have but recently learned from the _Persians_ of Timotheus that this metrical perfection may also be used to convey the most ludicrously silly conceits. Let us therefore take what Time has left us with thankfulness, and not disturb ourselves or mar our enjoyment by the application of barren theories. From Homer to the _Anthology_, you can find great poems and splendid fragments that will exalt you into the higher world reserved for those that can lay aside material cares. There you will enlarge the wealth of your souls; there you will enter upon the heritage left you by those that had attained and taken possession of the ideal to which all our love of beauty tends as its goal. But let me repeat to those who cannot quaff this poetry at the source: take it from the vessels of the English poets that are ready to your hands, not from the laboured prose of the modern scholar. Take Calverley’s Theocritus; take Browning’s Euripides; take Whitelaw’s Sophocles; take Frere’s Aristophanes. Thus may you reach not the real shrine, but, like some proselyte of old, the outer court of the matchless Temple. III GREEK PROSE