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reference to the Greeks.
The fate of the ancient classics among us was long since settled.
When the successor of Dr. Popkin was made President of Harvard College, in 1860, he virtually surrendered his traditions by translating the Greek quotations in his Inaugural Address; and what President Felton did for the elder language, President Eliot did for the Latin when he at the 250th anniversary of that institution, bestowed the honorary degrees in most sonorous English.
Grant that the ‘authors’ now share with all other writers, in all languages and departments, the limitations of the life of man, it is plain that those limitations bring the greatest change to those two languages which were once thought to hold all knowledge in their grasp.
But the same stern restriction makes itself felt in all directions; the age has outgrown its few simple and convenient playthings, and must choose amid a myriad of edgetools.
There will never be another universal scholar.
The time when Aristotle or Plutarch went the rounds of the universe, and tried to label each phenomenon, looks now like the childhood of
Boston, Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1892.
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