Nevertheless, as Plato saw, we must deal with these poets somehow.  It is possible (though not, I think, likely) that in the ideal State there would be no Literature, as it is certain there would be no Professors of it; but since its invention men have never been able to rid themselves of it for any length of time. Tamen usque recurrit. They may forbid Apollo, but still he comes leading his choir, the Nine:—­

  [Greek:  Akletos men egoge menoimi ken es de kaleunton
  Tharsesas Moisaisi snu amepeaisin ikoiman.]

And he may challenge us English boldly!  For since Chaucer, at any rate, he and his train have never been [Greek:  akletoi] to us—­least of all here in Cambridge.

Nay, we know that he should be welcome.  Cardinal Newman, proposing the idea of a University to the Roman Catholics of Dublin, lamented that the English language had not, like the Greek, ’some definite words to express, simply and generally, intellectual proficiency or perfection, such as “health,” as used with reference to the animal frame, and “virtue,” with reference to our moral nature.’  Well, it is a reproach to us that we do not possess the term:  and perhaps again a reproach to us that our attempts at it—­the word ‘culture’ for instance—­have been apt to take on some soil of controversy, some connotative damage from over-preaching on the one hand and impatience on the other.  But we do earnestly desire the thing.  We do prize that grace of intellect which sets So-and-so in our view as ‘a scholar and a gentleman.’  We do wish as many sons of this University as may be to carry forth that lifelong stamp from her precincts; and—­this is my point—­from our notion of such a man the touch of literary grace cannot be excluded.  I put to you for a test Lucian’s description of his friend Demonax—­

His way was like other people’s; he mounted no high horse; he was just a man and a citizen.  He indulged in no Socratic irony.  But his discourse was full of Attic grace; those who heard it went away neither disgusted by servility, nor repelled by ill-tempered censure, but on the contrary lifted out of themselves by charity, and encouraged to more orderly, contented, hopeful lives.

I put it to you, Sir, that Lucian needs not to say another word, but we know that Demonax had loved letters, and partly by aid of them had arrived at being such a man.  No; by consent of all, Literature is a nurse of noble natures, and right reading makes a full man in a sense even better than Bacon’s; not replete, but complete rather, to the pattern for which Heaven designed him.  In this conviction, in this hope, public spirited men endow Chairs in our Universities, sure that Literature is a good thing if only we can bring it to operate on young minds.