Among the strange differences between our ancestors and their descendants of latter days is the wide difference between the feelings and language of commentators on great classical works. At the restoration of letters, when men discovered the manuscripts of the great Ancients, as some long hidden treasure, the editors of even the most trivial work were exuberant in phrases of panegyric, and superlatives of praise seemed to be almost their only terms. In the editing of modern writers, on the contrary, we find the commentator everywhere assuming a sort of critical superiority over the author he edits. Which of the two is to be blamed? I must confess that the former (even admitting him more deficient in judgment, which I am by no means prepared to allow) is more congenial with the moral feelings, and better suited to all purposes of instruction, for though too much love for an author is like a mist which magnifies unduly, it brings forward objects that would otherwise have passed unnoticed. Never will I cease to deprecate that haughty insolence of the modern critic whose name would pass unknown were it not for the great and awful being on whom he exercises his art—like a monkey who has seated himself on the top of a rock, it is the rock which enables him to reach the eminence where he is making his grimaces. In the course of the Lectures it will be necessary to point out many instances of this kind.

It might be proper here to examine what have been the causes of this remarkable change—and to understand the matter it will be necessary to look back into history. There, perhaps, never was a time in civilized and christianized Europe which would be called an age of universal and complete darkness. When we speak of the dark ages, we ought often rather to say the ages in which we were in the dark—for there was always a chain along which this bright electric spark was conveyed, from the periods of its pristine brightness, even to our own day.