In the bookcase on the opposite side of the room there were complete editions of Landor and Swift, then came two large volumes on Leonardo da Vinci.  Raising his eyes, the parson read through the titles of Mr Browning’s work.  Tennyson was in a cheap seven-and-six edition; then came Swinburne, Pater, Rossetti, Morris, two novels by Rhoda Broughton, Dickens, Thackeray, Fielding, and Smollett; the complete works of Balzac, Gautier’s Emaux et Camees, Salammbo, L’Assommoir; add to this Carlyle, Byron, Shelley, Keats, &c.

At the end of a long silence, Mr Hare said, glancing once again at the Latin authors, and walking towards the fire: 

“Tell me, John, are those the books you are writing about?  Supposing you explain to me in a few words the line you are taking.  Your mother tells me that you intend to call your book the History of Christian Latin.”

“Yes, I had thought of using that title, but I am afraid it is a little too ambitious.  To write the history of a literature extending over at least eight centuries would entail an appalling amount of reading; and besides only a few, say a couple of dozen writers out of some hundreds, are of the slightest literary interest, and very few indeed of any real aesthetic value.  I have been hard at work lately, and I think I know enough of the literature of the Middle Ages to enable me to make a selection that will comprise everything of interest to ordinary scholarship, and enough to form a sound basis to rest my own literary theories upon.  I begin by stating that there existed in the Middle Ages a universal language such as Goethe predicted the future would again bring to us....

“Before the formation of the limbs, that is to say before the German and Roman languages were developed up to the point of literary usage, the Latin language was the language of all nations of the western world.  But the day came, in some countries a little earlier, in some a little later, when it was replaced by the national idioms.  The different literatures of the West had therefore been preceded by a Latin literature that had for a long time held out a supporting hand to each.  The language of this literature was not a dead language, It was the language of government, of science, of religion; and a little dislocated, a little barbarised, it had penetrated to the minds of the people, and found expression in drinking songs and street ditties.

“Such is the theme of my book; and it seems to me that a language that has played so important a part in the world’s history is well worthy of serious study.

“I show how Christianity, coming as it did with a new philosophy, and a new motive for life, invigorated and saved the Latin language in a time of decline and decrepitude.  For centuries it had given expression, even to satiety, to a naive joy in the present; on this theme, all that could be said had been said, all that could be sung had been sung, and the Rhetoricians were at work with alliteration and refrain when Christianity came, and impetuously forced the language to speak the desire of the soul.  In a word, I want to trace the effect that such a radical alteration in the music, if I may so speak, had upon the instrument—­the Latin language.”