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Book Description:
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1877 edition. Excerpt: ...life, that "we do not yet know what a Greek scholar is; we do not know even the process by which he is made one;" yet the number of those who can read Greek with the ease and facility with which thousands can read and enjoy the Odes of Horace is extremely limited. We are not all scholars. In this cduntry, at least, the law of labor is the law of our existence. The exceptions are so few that they are not worth considering. Most of us, if we have acquired in early life some slight taste for learning, and have desired to drink at its fountains, have been obliged to repress and subdue all such longings, and give our days and nights, and all our best thoughts and faculties, to the hard but inevitable task of earning our daily bread. And if at length, perchance, in rare instances a competency is earned in some professional or commercial pursuit, by that time the faculties have become indurated; wedded to their routine, the delicate and appreciative taste for classic literature, if not gone, is deadened; we are not what we were; we are farther still, yes, separated by an infinite gulf, from what we would have been, from what we intended to be. What we want, then, what the great body of educated men need, for pleasure, for recreation, for recalling the enjoyments and reviving the taste for the study of the great models of classic learning, is just such a work as Miiller's, which makes us seem to hear again the songs of Sappho, the recitals of Herodotus, or the plays of Sophocles and Euripides. On the question of the identity of Homer, and the authenticity of the Iliad and Odyssey, Miiller's theory--differing from that of Wolf or of Grote--is one that will be accepted by most who do not aspire to the refinements of scholarly criticism, and who...