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WHO CAN FIX A LIVING LANGUAGE?
opposed to the party of the classics, who move by slower ways to ends less personal, but in no wise easier of attainment. The magnanimity of the classic ideal has had scant justice done to it by modern criticism. To make literature the crowning symbol of a world-wide Civilization; to roof in the ages and units the elect of all time in the courtesy of one shining assembly, paying duty to one unquestioned code, to undo the work of Babel and knit together in a single community the scattered efforts of mankind towards order and reason--this was already an aim worthy of labour and sacrifice. Both have been freely given and the end is yet to seek. The self-assertion of the recusants has found eulogists in plenty, but who has celebrated the self-denial that was thrown away on this other task, which is further from fulfillment now than it was when the scholars of the Renaissance gave up their patriotism and the tongue of their childhood in the name of fellow cirtizenship with the ancients and the cecumenical authority of letters? Scholars, grammarians, wits and poets were content to bury the lustre of their wisdom and the hand-won fruits of their toil in the winding-sheet of a dead language, that they may be numbered with the family of Cicero, and added to the pious train of Virgil. It was a noble illusion, doomed to failure, the versatile genius of language cried out against the mono-
