R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

88 George SaintsburyOdyssey which he did in collaboration with anotherfriend, and for some of the latter years of his life a colleagueof mine, S. H. Butcher. I think I have heard thisbook described by a person professionally connected withbookselling as one of the most popular translations fromthe classics he has himself known. That it was at the sametime one of the most scholarly might be put down, notmerely by Lang's enemies but by a not ill-natured reader,to the fact of Butcher's participation, but that his attributionwould be insufficient ought to be seen by any onescholar enough himself to appreciate not merely thesingly turned out Theocritus, but almost every part ofLang's work. That he was not, in certain restricted sensesof' scholarship', a great master of it, may be true enough.But he was penetrated, in a way which was getting rarerin his own time and has been increasing its rarity eversince, with a sense of Greek and Roman literature which,when it was more common, was frequently disjoined fromany extensive knowledge of English, and was very seldomconjoined with any knowledge of other modernity exceptperhaps French which itself did not ascend beyond thegrand siecle with Montaigne or Rabelais or both. Therewas, of course, in a few cases and at one time a certainacquaintance with Italian, the coming in and the goingout of which have always both been rather mysteries tome. Every girl from Scott's heroines to my own sistersseems to have been-taught Dante and Petrarch and Tassoand even Ariosto as a matter of course. Have these beenchanged for civism and genetics?Now how many modern languages Lang knew, in afashion capable of satisfying the examiners, I do notknow. But I do know that all his work was, as I havesaid, saturated with knowledge of literature ancient andmodern.Of course some one may say: ' As far as the printed