ungoverned.  Such liberty is the ground of true distinction; it implies the opposite of an equalitarianism which reserves its honors and rewards for those who attain a bastard kind of distinction by the cunning of leadership, without departing from common standards—­the demagogues who rise by flattery.  But it is, on the other hand, by no means dependent on the artificial distinctions of privilege, and is peculiarly adapted to an age whose appointed task must be to create a natural aristocracy as a via media between an equalitarian democracy and a prescriptive oligarchy or plutocracy.  It is a notable fact that, as the real hostility to the classics in the present day arises from an instinctive suspicion of them as standing in the way of a downward-levelling mediocrity, so, at other times, they have fallen under displeasure for their veto on a contrary excess.  Thus, in his savage attack on the Commonwealth, to which he gave the significant title Behemoth, Hobbes lists the reading of classical history among the chief causes of the rebellion.  “There were,” he says, “an exceeding great number of men of the better sort, that had been so educated as that in their youth, having read the books written by famous men of the ancient Grecian and Roman commonwealths concerning their polity and great actions, in which books the popular government was extolled by that glorious name of liberty, and monarchy disgraced by the name of tyranny, they became thereby in love with their forms of government; and out of these men were chosen the greatest part of the House of Commons; or if they were not the greatest part, yet by advantage of their eloquence were always able to sway the rest.”  To this charge Hobbes returns again and again, even declaring that “the universities have been to this nation as the Wooden Horse was to the Trojans.”  And the uncompromising monarchist of the Leviathan, himself a classicist of no mean attainments, as may be known by his translation of Thucydides, was not deceived in his accusation.  The tyrannicides of Athens and Rome, the Aristogeitons and Brutuses and others, were the heroes by whose example the leaders of the French Revolution (rightly, so far as they did not fall into the opposite, equalitarian extreme) were continually justifying their acts: 

  There Brutus starts and stares by midnight taper,
  Who all the day enacts—­a woollen-draper.

And again, in the years of the Risorgimento, more than one of the champions of Italian liberty went to death with those great names on their lips.

So runs the law of order and right subordination.  But if the classics offer the best service to education by inculcating an aristocracy of intellectual distinction, they are equally effective in enforcing the similar lesson of time.  It is a true saying of our ancient humanist that “the longer it continueth in a name or lineage, the more is nobility extolled and marvelled at.”  It is true because in this