This quest is but the beginning of a search which is and must be lifelong.  Perhaps I am wrong in calling it the beginning, and there are others who would and do bid you begin earlier.  I can only ask you to begin where I began or begin myself.  At any rate if you begin later or elsewhere I am confident that you will lose much light on your present selves and your present world.  My own temptation has been rather to stop too soon and so to overleap the intervening period—­the ’Middle Ages’—­between such Antiquity and the Present.  Fortunately for you, you have guides who will point out to you the way of a profitable and instructive journey across the—­to me—­unknown or imperfectly explored land.  I must, however, in no controversy with any of my fellow lecturers here, say a word on the contention that the true beginning of the modern mind and its world—­our mind and our world—­lies later and elsewhere than in Classical Antiquity.  The birthday and birthplace of that mind and its world have been variously fixed.  We have been bidden to find the one, say, as late as the sixteenth century and the other—­not from the same point of view—­in the plains and woods of Northern Europe or in the deserts of Arabia or in some still more vaguely indicated region of the East.  But I must avow my conviction that our civilization—­and I specially remember that we are Englishmen—­is not only in origin but in essence, Greco-Roman, modified no doubt by influences unknown to that in its earlier stages, but still Greco-Roman grown to a larger stature and a clearer self-consciousness, self-shaped to its present form, the same vital and vitalizing force, constantly reinvigorated and re-enlightened by reflection upon its own past.  It is a true instinct that in this country still bases our system of higher education upon a study of the languages and literature of Classical Antiquity.  We are, as Englishmen, co-heirs, because co-descendants of Classical Antiquity, with France and Italy and Greece, yes also with Germany, for European civilization—­and not European civilization only—­is, I reiterate, in essence still Greco-Roman, not Teutonic or Semitic.  At least, if this inheritance is not ours by descent it is ours by adoption, and we are equally legitimate members of the household.  And the bonds of such spiritual kinship are closer and more durable than those of blood, if indeed those of blood provably exist at all.

The works and thoughts of which I am to speak—­the dreams, the plans, the hopes and aspirations—­are assuredly ours also, the stuff and substance of our being, our inner genius, our guiding and controlling selves, what we in our first youth imagined and conceived, what we believed, what we, in our later maturity, designed and in part executed.  If we turn inward we cannot read them there, for the characters are small and faded; but as we hear their history recounted as it is by professional historians, we recognize it as the record of a past which is our very own, while at the same time it is a past which we share with other nations who are our co-partners in the work of conserving, deepening, extending, enriching the present-day civilization of Europe and the world.