GREEN LAND FAR AWAY 39

fairies tripping in rings on the turf, the dryads tempted out of
their barken hiding-places, the water-nymphs making high
festival on the silver flood.5*

Knowledge of the classics was still a universal passport. It
opened the doors of intellectual society. On that solid foundation
of common effort and allusion, the culture of a gentleman rested.
Statesmen quoted Latin in the Commons and even on the
hustings: and busy men of the world found relaxation in the
evenings or on holiday in re-reading the authors of the old pagan
world whom they had first encountered at school or college*
Macaulay defined an independent scholar as one who read Plato
with his feet on the fender. In the characters of the ancient world
such men recognised themselves, their own failings and virtues.
"I am reading Plutarch's lives," wrote Edward Fitzgerald, "one
of the most delightful books I have ever read: he must have been
a gentleman.'* The common experiences of life constantly recalled
to such readers the reflections of their fellow men who had passed
the same way under other skies many hundreds of years before.

"I took down a Juvenal," one of them wrote to a friend, "to
look for a passage about the Loaded Wagon rolling through the
Roman streets. I couldn't find it. Do you know where it is?"1
The absorption of their degenerate descendants in cross-word
puzzles and detective novels is a faint and attenuated reflection of
this bygone passion. Sometimes the incongruity of it struck
them with a glow of pleasure: "think," wrote one, "of the
rocococity of a gentleman studying Seneca in the middle of
February, 1844, *& a remarkably damp cottage." The pleasure
once acquired never deserted them, and death found them with
their thumbed Homer or Horace by their side. Forty years later
,-an English poet who had grown up with the century, crossing
Lake Garda on a summer's evening,put into his native verse the
innate love of his generation for the classical learning of his
youth:

"Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row!
So they row'd, and there we landed—* 0 venusta Sirmio *—
There to me thro' all the groves of olive in the summer

glow,
There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple

flowers grow,

^Letters and Literary Remains qf Edward Fitzgerald* /. 388.