begin where I began or begin myself. At any rate if you begin later or
elsewhere I am confident that you will lose much light on your present
selves and your present world. My own temptation has been rather to stop
too soon and so to overleap the intervening period--the 'Middle
Ages'--between such Antiquity and the Present. Fortunately for you, you
have guides who will point out to you the way of a profitable and
instructive journey across the--to me--unknown or imperfectly explored
land. I must, however, in no controversy with any of my fellow lecturers
here, say a word on the contention that the true beginning of the modern
mind and its world--our mind and our world--lies later and elsewhere
than in Classical Antiquity. The birthday and birthplace of that mind
and its world have been variously fixed. We have been bidden to find the
one, say, as late as the sixteenth century and the other--not from the
same point of view--in the plains and woods of Northern Europe or in the
deserts of Arabia or in some still more vaguely indicated region of the
East. But I must avow my conviction that our civilization--and I
specially remember that we are Englishmen--is not only in origin but in
essence, Greco-Roman, modified no doubt by influences unknown to that in
its earlier stages, but still Greco-Roman grown to a larger stature and
a clearer self-consciousness, self-shaped to its present form, the same
vital and vitalizing force, constantly reinvigorated and re-enlightened
by reflection upon its own past. It is a true instinct that in this
country still bases our system of higher education upon a study of the
languages and literature of Classical Antiquity. We are, as Englishmen,
co-heirs, because co-descendants of Classical Antiquity, with France and
Italy and Greece, yes also with Germany, for European civilization--and
not European civilization only--is, I reiterate, in essence still
Greco-Roman, not Teutonic or Semitic. At least, if this inheritance is
not ours by descent it is ours by adoption, and we are equally
legitimate members of the household. And the bonds of such spiritual