Instant acceptance not seldom preludes final rejection. In the middle of
the last century Martin Tupper's _Proverbial Philosophy_ garnished
every drawing-room table; and now, where is it?
Your loving old
G.P.
_P.S._--Do not look for the passage on Marie Antoinette in the _French
Revolution_, for you will not find it there, but in the "Essay of the
Diamond Necklace."
24
MY DEAR ANTONY,
You and I once had a cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, who, had he
lived, would very certainly have left a brilliant addition to the
lustre of the name he bore. He was born in 1798, and only lived
forty-five years, dying when his powers were leading him to high
fortune in that legal profession which so many of the family have
pursued.
He was a scholar of Eton; a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; he
won the Greek and Latin Odes in 1820, and the Greek Ode again in 1821.
To him, therefore, the classic spirit was inborn, and a training that
omitted the study of Latin and Greek the very negation of education.
He would have had something very trenchant to say of what is now known
as "the modern side." He wrote a very rich and splendid prose, and it
is no fond family partiality that leads me to quote to you his
eloquent and precious defence of the classical languages:--
"I am not one whose lot it has been to grow old in literary
retirement, devoted to classical studies with an exclusiveness
which might lead to an overweening estimate of these two noble
languages.
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