had his senate-house or his law-court provided, whereas Thespis jogged to fairs in a cart, and the Muse of History, like any street acrobat, had to collect her own crowd.  Herodotus in search of a public packed his history in a portmanteau, carted it to Olympia, found a favourable ‘pitch,’ as we should say, and wooed an audience to him much as on a racecourse nowadays do those philanthropic gentlemen who ply a dubious trade with three half-crowns and a gold chain.  It would cost us an effort to imagine the late Bishop Stubbs thus trying his fortune with a bag full of select Charters at Queen’s Club or at Kempton Park, and exerting his lungs to retrieve a crowd that showed some disposition to edge off towards the ring or the rails.

The historian’s conditions have improved; and like any other sensible man he has advanced his claim with them, and revised his method.  He writes nowadays with his eye on the printed book.  He may or may not be a dull fellow:  being a dull fellow, he may or may not be aware of it; but at least he knows that, if you lay him upside down on your knee, you can on awaking pick him up, resume your absorption, and even turn back some pages to discover just where or why your interest flagged:  whereas a Hellene who deserted Herodotus, having a bet on the Pentathlon, not only missed what he missed but missed it for life.

The invention of print, of course, has made all, or almost all, the difference.

I do not forget that the printed book—­the written word—­presupposes a speaking voice, and must ever have at its back some sense in us of the speaking voice.  But in writing prose nowadays, while always recollecting that prose has its origin in speech—­even as it behoves us to recollect that Homer intoned the Iliad to the harp and Sappho plucked her passion from the lyre—­we have to take things as they are.  Except Burns, Heine, Beranger (with Moore, if you will), and you will find it hard to compile in all the lyrical poetry of the last 150 years a list of half a dozen first-class or even second-class bards who wrote primarily to be sung.  It may help you to estimate how far lyrical verse has travelled from its origins if you will but remind yourselves that a sonnet and a sonata were once the same thing, and that a ballad meant a song accompanied by dancing—­the word ballata having been specialised down, on the one line to the ballet, in which Mademoiselle Genee or the Russian performers will dance for our delight, using no words at all; on the other to “Sir Patrick Spens” or “Clerk Saunders,” ‘ballads’ to which no one in his senses would dream of pointing a toe.