A classic, according to the usual definition, is an old author canonised by admiration, and an authority in his particular style.  The word classic was first used in this sense by the Romans.  With them not all the citizens of the different classes were properly called classici, but only those of the chief class, those who possessed an income of a certain fixed sum.  Those who possessed a smaller income were described by the term infra classem, below the preeminent class.  The word classicus was used in a figurative sense by Aulus Gellius, and applied to writers:  a writer of worth and distinction, classicus assiduusque scriptor, a writer who is of account, has real property, and is not lost in the proletariate crowd.  Such an expression implies an age sufficiently advanced to have already made some sort of valuation and classification of literature.

At first the only true classics for the moderns were the ancients.  The Greeks, by peculiar good fortune and natural enlightenment of mind, had no classics but themselves.  They were at first the only classical authors for the Romans, who strove and contrived to imitate them.  After the great periods of Roman literature, after Cicero and Virgil, the Romans in their turn had their classics, who became almost exclusively the classical authors of the centuries which followed.  The middle ages, which were less ignorant of Latin antiquity than is believed, but which lacked proportion and taste, confused the ranks and orders.  Ovid was placed above Homer, and Boetius seemed a classic equal to Plato.  The revival of learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries helped to bring this long chaos to order, and then only was admiration rightly proportioned.  Thenceforth the true classical authors of Greek and Latin antiquity stood out in a luminous background, and were harmoniously grouped on their two heights.

Meanwhile modern literatures were born, and some of the more precocious, like the Italian, already possessed the style of antiquity.  Dante appeared, and, from the very first, posterity greeted him as a classic.  Italian poetry has since shrunk into far narrower bounds; but, whenever it desired to do so, it always found again and preserved the impulse and echo of its lofty origin.  It is no indifferent matter for a poetry to derive its point of departure and classical source in high places; for example, to spring from Dante rather than to issue laboriously from Malherbe.

Modern Italy had her classical authors, and Spain had every right to believe that she also had hers at a time when France was yet seeking hers.  A few talented writers en dowed with originality and exceptional animation, a few brilliant efforts, isolated, without following, interrupted and recommenced, did not suffice to endow a nation with a solid and imposing basis of literary wealth.  The idea of a classic implies something that has continuance and consistence, and which produces unity and tradition fashions and