Were it otherwise, if the father, whether poet, sculptor,
actor, physician or advocate, could leave the rich results
of study, experience, observation and long practice, to-
gether with individual capacity, to the son, how one
generation would surpass another, rising upon its help-
ing shoulders to newer heights of manly power. But
no such thing happens; and while material progress
goes strongly forward from age to age, the development
of the individual man is slow ; so slow, indeed, that, con-
fining their observation, to historic times alone, many
are disposed to deny any advance. It is nearly 3000
years since Homer shaped his epic of the siege of
Troy. And yet no poet in succeeding ages has surpassed
him in vigor of imagination and in hurried but harmoni-

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f ndivlduaUtis in Brt ; Co^opcvMon in Science

ous movement and few have equaled him in insight into
character or in constructive faculty. His work remains
one of the masterpieces of literature. And where is
there now a language so flexible, so rich in its resources
for the expression of subtle thought or eager passion,
so musical as that in which he sang — the tongue that
represented the heart, the intellect, the development, the
national individuality of Greece ? Among his countrymen
in after times there was an orator whose speeches are
still studied in our schools ; and for terseness of expres-
sion, for sinewy force of argument, for high moral
purpose, it is better to go to Demosthenes "On the
Crown" than to the vaporings of politicians of our own
day. The centuries saw no superior until the coming
of Edmund Burke. Where is there fairer marble shaped
into finer curves of beauty and majesty than in the
ancient statues that have survived the wreck of more
than one civilization? And if the paintings of the
Grecian artists have perished, yet knowing how their
fame survives, we hesitate to say that greater have been
born since they died. And the dramas of Athens ! Even
one who has caught, in the faint twilight of a dead
language, a dim notion of their grace, their beauty,
their simplicity of structure, their sublimity of tone and
their solemn moral lessons, carries the memory with him
and would not dream of naming anyone save Shakes-
peare as a master or even as a peer of -^schylus and
his companions. 