I have gone back to Greek literature with a passion quite astonishing to myself.  I have never felt anything like it.  I was enraptured with Italian during the six months which I gave up to it; and I was little less pleased with Spanish.  But, when I went back to the Greek, I felt as if I had never known before what intellectual enjoyment was.  Oh that wonderful people!  There is not one art, not one science, about which we may not use the same expression which Lucretius has employed about the victory over superstition, “Primum Graius homo—.”

I think myself very fortunate in having been able to return to these great masters while still in the full vigour of life, and when my taste and judgment are mature.  Most people read all the Greek that they ever read before they are five and twenty.  They never find time for such studies afterwards till they are in the decline of life; and then their knowledge of the language is in a great measure lost, and cannot easily be recovered.  Accordingly, almost all the ideas that people have of Greek literature, are ideas formed while they were still very young.  A young man, whatever his genius may be, is no judge of such a writer as Thucydides.  I had no high opinion of him ten years ago.  I have now been reading him with a mind accustomed to historical researches, and to political affairs; and I am astonished at my own former blindness, and at his greatness.  I could not bear Euripides at college.  I now read my recantation.  He has faults undoubtedly.  But what a poet!  The Medea, the Alcestis, the Troades, the Bacchae, are alone sufficient to place him in the very first rank.  Instead of depreciating him, as I have done, I may, for aught I know, end by editing him.

I have read Pindar,—­with less pleasure than I feel in reading the great Attic poets, but still with admiration.  An idea occurred to me which may very likely have been noticed by a hundred people before.  I was always puzzled to understand the reason for the extremely abrupt transitions in those Odes of Horace which are meant to be particularly fine.  The “justum et tenacem” is an instance.  All at once you find yourself in heaven, Heaven knows how.  What the firmness of just men in times of tyranny, or of tumult, has to do with Juno’s oration about Troy it is hardly possible to conceive.  Then, again, how strangely the fight between the Gods and the Giants is tacked on to the fine hymn to the Muses in that noble ode, “Descende coelo et die age tibia”!  This always struck me as a great fault, and an inexplicable one; for it is peculiarly alien from the calm good sense, and good taste, which distinguish Horace.