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PEACOCK 55
century living in the nineteenth ; nothing
could be farther from the truth. He loved
the sense and dignity of the Augustans, just
as he loved the fire and romance of the
Renaissance, and the mysterious gaiety of
the Middle Ages ; but he could have
criticized any of them with as good a will as
he criticized the age of machinery and " the
march of mind," and, had he been born in
any one of them, would doubtless have done
so. He was a student of bardic poetry
who yet admired Ariosto ; his passion for
classical literature was uncommonly wise and
sincere ; he read Sophocles for pleasure. So
remote was he from the eighteenth-century
Grecians that he could perceive and enjoy the
romantic element in Greek life and art ; yet
it is a mistake to call him a Greek. An
Athenian of the time of Pericles was, he
thought, the noblest specimen of humanity
that history had to show, and of that nobility
he assimilated what he could. He acquired a
distaste for cant, prudery, facile emotion, and
philanthropy ; he learnt to enjoy the good
things of life without fear or shame to love
;
strength and beauty, and to respect the truth.
For all that, he was a modern too ; sharp eyes
can see it in his verse. A touch of gloating
and uninquisitive wonder, a suspicion of
sentiment for sentiment's sake, the ghost of an