Do not think this easy.  The study of right literary criticism is much more difficult than the false path usually trodden; so difficult, indeed, that you may easily count the men who have attempted to grasp the great rules and apply them to writing as an art to be practised.  But the names include some very great ones—­Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian, Corneille, Boileau, Dryden, Johnson, Lessing, Coleridge, Goethe, Sainte-Beuve, Arnold:  and the study, though it may not find its pattern in our time, is not unworthy to be proposed for another attempt before a great University.

LECTURE IX.

ON THE LINEAGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (II)

Wednesday, November 5

Some of you whose avocations call them, from time to time, to Newmarket may have noted, at a little distance out from Cambridge, a by-road advertised as leading to Quy and Swaffham.  It also leads to the site of an old Roman villa; but you need not interrupt your business to visit this, since the best thing discovered there—­a piece of tessellated pavement—­has been removed and deposited in the Geological Museum here in Downing Street, where you may study it very conveniently.  It is not at all a first-class specimen of its kind:  not to be compared, for example, with the wonderful pavement at Dorchester, or with that (measuring 35 feet by 20) of the great villa unearthed, a hundred years ago, at Stonesfield in Oxfordshire:  but I take it as the handiest, and am going to build a small conjecture upon it, or rather a small suggestion of a guess.  Remember there is no harm in guessing so long as we do not pretend our guess-work to be something else.

I will ask you to consider first that in these pavements, laid bare for us as ‘the whistling rustic tends his plough,’ we have work dating somewhere between the first and fifth centuries, work of unchallengeable beauty, work of a beauty certainly not rivalled until we come to the Norman builders of five or six hundred years later.  I want you to let your minds dwell on these long stretches of time—­four hundred years or so of Roman occupation (counting, not from Caesar’s raids, but from the serious invasion of 43 A.D. under Aulus Plautius, say to some while after the famous letter of Honorius, calling home the legions).  You may safely put it at four hundred years, and then count six hundred as the space before the Normans arrive—­a thousand years altogether, or but a fraction—­one short generation—­less than the interval of time that separates us from King Alfred.  In the great Cathedral of Winchester (where sleep, by the way, two gentle writers specially beloved, Isaak Walton and Jane Austen) above the choir-screen to the south, you may see a line of painted chests, of which the inscription on one tells you that it holds what was mortal of King Canute.

     Here are sands, ignoble things,
     Dropp’d from the ruin’d sides of Kings.