sonnets of his, Milton was deliberately modelling upon the “Horatian Ode,” as his confrere, Andrew Marvell, was avowedly attempting the like in his famous Horation Ode on Cromwell’s Return from Ireland; so that if Cromwell had returned (like Mr Quilp), walked in and caught his pair of Latin Secretaries scribbling verse, one at either end of the office table, both might colourably have pleaded that they were, after all, writing Latin.  Waller’s task in poetry was to labour true classical polish where Cowley laboured sham-classical form.  Put together Dryden’s various Prefaces and you will find them one solid monument to his classical faith.  Of Pope, Gray, Collins, you will not ask me to speak.  What is salt in Cowper you can taste only when you have detected that by a stroke of madness he missed, or barely missed, being our true English Horace, that almost more nearly than the rest he hit what the rest had been seeking.  Then, of the ’romantic revival’—­ enemy of false classicism, not of classicism—­bethink you what, in his few great years, Wordsworth owed directly to France of the early Revolution; what Keats drew forth out of Lempriere:  and again bethink you how Tennyson wrought upon Theocritus, Virgil, Catullus; upon what Arnold constantly shaped his verse; how Browning returned ever upon Italy to inspire his best and correct his worse.

Of Anglo-Saxon prose I know little indeed, but enough of the world to feel reasonably sure that if it contained any single masterpiece—­or anything that could be paraded as a masterpiece—­we should have heard enough about it long before now.  It was invented by King Alfred for excellent political reasons; but, like other ready-made political inventions in this country, it refused to thrive.  I think it can be demonstrated, that the true line of intellectual descent in prose lies through Bede (who wrote in Latin, the ’universal language’), and not through the Blickling Homilies, or, AElfric, or the Saxon Chronicle.  And I am sure that Freeman is perversely wrong when he laments as a ’great mistake’ that the first Christian missionaries from Rome did not teach their converts to pray and give praise in the vernacular.  The vernacular being what it was, these men did better to teach the religion of the civilised world—­orbis terrarum—­in the language of the civilised world.  I am not thinking of its efficiency for spreading the faith; but neither is Freeman; and, for that, we must allow these old missionaries to have known their own business.  I am thinking only of how this ’great mistake’ affected our literature; and if you will read Professor Saintsbury’s “History of English Prose Rhythm” (pioneer work, which yet wonderfully succeeds in illustrating what our prose-writers from time to time were trying to do); if you will study the Psalms in the Authorised Version; if you will consider what Milton, Clarendon, Sir Thomas Browne, were aiming at; what Addison, Gibbon, Johnson; what Landor, Thackeray, Newman, Arnold, Pater; I doubt not your rising from the perusal convinced that our nation, in this storehouse of Latin to refresh and replenish its most sacred thoughts, has enjoyed a continuous blessing:  that the Latin of the Vulgate and the Offices has been a background giving depth and, as the painters say, ‘value’ to nine-tenths of our serious writing.