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church , led to a marked difference of character between the writers in the two languages ; but of both literatures , as they were cultivated by Pagan antiquity , the original elements were the same ; and the Latin language ^ even in the hands of its greatest masters , —Lucretius , Virgil , and Cicero , —served chiefly as a strainer , through which the spirit of Grecian poetry and philosophy was distilled into the rude minds of the Western nations * .
This infusion of the spirit of one people into the arts and written productions of another , Herder could not reconcile with his favourite theory of the desirableness oC preserving national characteristics perfectly distinct , and of reflecting them in the colour of the national literature . Hence we find him bitterly deploring the destruction of the independent tribes which anciently peopled Italy , the barbarous subversion of the liberties of Greece , and that
wide extension of the Roman arms , which , in a manner , amalgamated the discordant materials of their conquests into one homogeneous mass ,, and obliterated all traces of a native and popular literature in the fixed and uniform character of style and thought which it stamped on the productions of the Greek writers under the empire . It sometimes occurs , as a curious speculation , to the inquirer , —what might have been the different form and character of the Roman mind , had it grown up and developed itself ,
without the co-operation of any foreign causes , under the influence of the mythological legends and heroic songs , which were the original produce of Italy , and of which Niebuhr has conceived that the vestiges may even now be traced in the earlier books of Livy . While , however , it is freely granted that there is something peculiarly delightful in the freshness and raciness of a literature that is purely national , reason , and an observation of the course of Providence , compel us at the same time to remark , that the harvests of civilization are oftentimes accelerated and
enriched by a mixture of soils , and that the blessings of intellectual and moral culture are diffused , equalized , and eventually increased by the incorporation of different tribes . Our own history and literature afford decisive evidence of this truth . A nobler and braver race have sprung from the intermingling of Norman and Saxon blood ; nor could we have had a Chaucer , a Spenser , or a Shakspeare , if the rude minstrelsy of Runic bards had not been
impregnated with the romantic spirit of early French literature . We can sympathise with Herder to the uttermost in his condemnation of the murderous and desolating conquests of the Romans , without being insensible to the benefits , of which even those con ^ quests , bloody as they were , may have been ultimately productive to mankind . This is not weighing the laws of Providence in the scales of human reason , nor sacrificing the moral justice of history
? An eloquent comparison of the capabilities of these two languages will be found ia Mr . Coleridge ' s admirable Introduction to the Study of the Classic Poets . Part 1 ,
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218 The Philosophy of the History of Mankind .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1832, page 218, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1810/page/2/
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