in China; in our own cycle, in France, Italy, England:  where the trees of the nation literatures received buddings and manurings from abroad, but produced always their own natural national fruit:—­Shakespeare was your true English apple, grown from the Chaucer stock; although in him flower for juices the sweetness and elixir of all the world and the ancient ages.  But in Rome, before the stock was more than a tiny seedling, a great branch of Greece was grafted on it,—­and a degenerate Greece at that—­and now we do not know even what kind of fruit-tree that Roman stock should have grown to be.

How, then, did this submersion and obliteration of the Roman soul come to pass?  It is not difficult to guess.  Greek meant culture:  if you wanted culture you learnt Greek.  All education was in Greek hands.  The Greek master spoke Latin to his boys; no doubt with a Greek accent.  So cultured speech, cultured Latin, came to mean Latin without its syllabic stresses; spoken, as nearly as might be, with Greek evenness and quantity.—­As if French should so submerge us, that we spoke our United States dapping out syllable by syllable like Frenchmen.  But it is a fearful thing for a nation to forgo the rhythm evolved under the stress of its own Soul,—­especially when what it takes on instead is the degenerate leavings of another:  Alexandria, not Athens.  This Rome did.  She gained the world, and lost her own soul; and the exchange profited her as little as you might expect.

Imitation of culture is often the last touch that makes the parvenu unbearable; it was so in Rome.  One likes better in some ways Cato’s stult old Roman attitude:  who scorned Greek all his life for sheer foppery, while he knew of nothing better written in it than such trash as poetry and philosophy; but at eighty came on a Greek treatise on manure and straightway learned the language that he might read and enjoy something profitable and thoroughly Roman in spirit.—­Greek artists flocked to Rome; and doubtless the more fifth-rate they were the better a thing they made of it:  but it was risky for good men to rely on Roman appreciations.  Two flute-players are contending at a concert; Greek and perhaps rather good.  Their music is soon drowned in catcalls:  What the dickens do we Romans want with such footling tootlings? Then the presiding magistrate has an idea.  He calls on them to quit that fooler and get down to business:—­Give us our money’s worth, condemn you to it, ye naughty knaves:  fight!—­And fight they must, poor things, while the audience, that but now was bored to death, howls with rapture.