said Adsum, and the end of Socrates in the Phaedo moved one more than seemed becoming—­these, and a passage in the history of Skalagrim Lamb’s Tail, and, as I said, the ruin of the Athenians in the Syracusan Bay.  I have read these chapters in an old French version derived through the Italian from a Latin translation of Thucydides.  Even in this far-descended form, the tale keeps its pathos; the calm, grave stamp of that tragic telling cannot be worn away by much handling, by long time, by the many changes of human speech.  “Others too,” says Nicias, in that fatal speech, when—­

   “All was done that men may do,
   And all was done in vain,”—­

“having achieved what men may, have borne what men must.”  This is the very burden of life, and the last word of tragedy.  For now all is vain:  courage, wisdom, piety, the bravery of Lamachus, the goodness of Nicias, the brilliance of Alcibiades, all are expended, all wasted, nothing of that brave venture abides, except torture, defeat, and death.  No play not poem of individual fortunes is so moving as this ruin of a people; no modern story can stir us, with all its eloquence, like the brief gravity of this ancient history.  Nor can we find, at the last, any wisdom more wise than that which bids us do what men may, and bear what men must.  Such are the lessons of the Greek, of the people who tried all things, in the morning of the world, and who still speak to us of what they tried in words which are the sum of human gaiety and gloom, of grief and triumph, hope and despair.  The world, since their day, has but followed in the same round, which only seems new:  has only made the same experiments, and failed with the same failure, but less gallantly and less gloriously.

One’s school-boy adventures among books ended not long after winning the friendship of Homer and Thucydides, of Lucretius and Catullus.  One’s application was far too desultory to make a serious and accurate scholar.

I confess to having learned the classical languages, as it were by accident, for the sake of what is in them, and with a provokingly imperfect accuracy.  Cricket and trout occupied far too much of my mind and my time:  Christopher North, and Walton, and Thomas Tod Stoddart, and “The Moor and the Loch,” were my holiday reading, and I do not regret it.  Philologists and Ireland scholars are not made so, but you can, in no way, fashion a scholar out of a casual and inaccurate intelligence.  The true scholar is one whom I envy, almost as much as I respect him; but there is a kind of mental short-sightedness, where accents and verbal niceties are concerned, which cannot be sharpened into true scholarship.  Yet, even for those afflicted in this way, and with the malady of being “idle, careless little boys,” the ancient classics have a value for which there is no substitute.  There is a charm in finding ourselves—­our common humanity, our puzzles, our cares, our joys, in the writings of men severed from us by race, religion, speech, and half the gulf of historical time—­which no other literary pleasure can equal.  Then there is to be added, as the university preacher observed, “the pleasure of despising our fellow-creatures who do not know Greek.”  Doubtless in that there is great consolation.