of the cave," are no offence to him; are direct informations, it may
be, beyond price, from a kindly spirit of truth in things.

For him there had been two grand surprises, two pre-eminent
manifestations of the power and charm of man, not to be explained
away,--one, within the compass of general and public observation: the
other, a matter of special intimacy to himself. There had been the
greatness of the old Greek and Roman life, so greatly recorded: there
had been the wisdom and kindness of Etienne de la Boetie, as made
known in all their fulness to him alone. That his ardent devotion to
the ancients had been rewarded with minute knowledge concerning them,
was the privilege of the age in which he was born, late in the
Revival of Letters. But the classical reading, which with others was
often but an affectation, seducing them from the highest to a lower
degree of reality, from men and women to their mere shadows in old
books, had been for him nothing less than personal contact. "The
qualities and fortunes" of the old Romans, especially, their
wonderful straight ways through the world, the straight passage of
their armies upon them, the splendour of their armour, of their
entire external presence and show, their "riches and embellishments,"
above all, "the suddenness of Augustus," in that grander age for
which decision was justifiable because really [98] possible, had ever
been "more in his head than the fortunes of his own country." If "we
have no hold even on things present but by imagination," as he loved
to observe,--then, how much more potent, steadier, larger, the
imaginative substance of the world of Alexander and Socrates, of
Virgil and Caesar, than that of an age, which seemed to him, living
in the midst of it, respectable mainly by its docility, by an
imitation of the ancients which after all left untouched the real
sources of their greatness. They had been indeed great, at the least