He was born into the first rank among nations; he had an eye quick to see, a mind clear, open, and bold to grasp facts, set them in order, and generalise their law; an instinct for art that turned all his observation and thinking into literature.
Whether he looked at the world about him or fixed his gaze upon his own nature, his insight was from the very beginning so direct, so commanding, so perfectly allied with beauty, that his speculations became philosophy and his emotions poetry.

There was hardly any aspect of life which he did not see, no question which he did not ask, and few which he failed to answer with more or less of truth.

He walked through an untrodden world of sights and sounds, and reproduced the vast circle of his life in a literature to which men will look as long as the world stands for models of sweetness, beauty, and power.

Greek literature holds its place, not because scholars have combined to keep alive its traditions and make familiarity with it the bond of the fellowship of culture, but because it is the faithful reflection of the life of a race who faced the world on all sides with masterly intelligence and power.

It is a liberal education to have travelled from Aeschylus, with his almost Asiatic splendour of imagination, to Theocritus, under whose exquisite touch the soft outlines of Sicilian life took on idyllic loveliness! And then there were those unbroken winter evenings, when one began really to know the great modern masters of literature.