+"Hos phato tous d’ ede katechen physizoos aia
       en Lakedaimoni authi, phile en patridi gaie."+

These lines live because they contain something which is also permanent in man:  they depend confidently on us, and will as confidently depend on our great-grandchildren.  I was glad to see this point very courageously put the other day by Professor Hiram Corson, of Cornell University, in an address on “The Aims of Literary Study”—­an address which Messrs. Macmillan have printed and published here and in America.  “All works of genius,” says Mr. Corson, “render the best service, in literary education, when they are first assimilated in their absolute character.  It is, of course, important to know their relations to the several times and places in which they were produced; but such knowledge is not for the tyro in literary study.  He must first know literature, if he is constituted so to know it, in its absolute character.  He can go into the philosophy of its relationships later, if he like, when he has a true literary education, and when the ‘years that bring the philosophic mind’ have been reached.  Every great production of genius is, in fact, in its essential character, no more related to one age than to another.  It is only in its phenomenal character (its outward manifestations) that it has a special relationship.”  And Mr. Corson very appositely quotes Mr. Ruskin on Shakespeare’s historical plays—­

“If it be said that Shakespeare wrote perfect historical plays on subjects belonging to the preceding centuries, I answer that they are perfect plays just because there is no care about centuries in them, but a life which all men recognize for the human life of all time; and this it is, not because Shakespeare sought to give universal truth, but because, painting honestly and completely from the men about him, he painted that human nature which is, indeed, constant enough—­a rogue in the fifteenth century being at heart what a rogue is in the nineteenth century and was in the twelfth; and an honest or knightly man being, in like manner, very similar to other such at any other time.  And the work of these great idealists is, therefore, always universal:  not because it is not portrait, but because it is complete portrait down to the heart, which is the same in all ages; and the work of the mean idealists is not universal, not because it is portrait, but because it is half portrait—­of the outside, the manners and the dress, not of the heart.  Thus Tintoret and Shakespeare paint, both of them, simply Venetian and English nature as they saw it in their time, down to the root; and it does for all time; but as for any care to cast themselves into the particular ways of thought, or custom, of past time in their historical work, you will find it in neither of them, nor in any other perfectly great man that I know of.”—­Modern Painters.