On Monday, at the annual distribution of prizes at Mason
College, Birmingham, Professor Jebb delivered an address, in which he declared, and we think rightly, that " the spirit which the classics embodied now animated the higher litera- ture of the country to a greater extent than at any previous time in the history of English letters," and that an interest in ancient art and literature was more widely diffused than before. The Romantic school had little sympathy with the Greek desire for light and clearness, and even Carlyle and Macaulay were anti-classical. Newman, on the other hand, though his scholarship " was, in Greek at least, not equal to Macaulay's," possessed the true classical qualities in his prose. Professor Jebb then traced the Greek revival in Dr. Arnold and Grote and in Freeman, Matthew Arnold, Browning, the late Mr. Symonds, and Professor Seller. The Greek mind, he declared, " stands out clearly as the great originating mind of Europe." That is true. Except in faith in morals, and therefore in politics, human thought has never quickened, unless when in contact with the Greek spirit. The beginnings of all art, all poetry, all science, all speculation, are in the Greek, Faith and conduct belong to the Hebrew, law and government to the Roman.
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