Note 340 — Chapter VI · THE STUDY OF LITERATURE.

It was explained, and in manner I think not open to any but wilful misunderstanding, that among the branches of so-called, and not unjustly so-called, Criticism which were excluded from this History was the greater part of merely commentatorial “scholarship”—the editing and interpretative part of the scholarship of the Renaissance and the succeeding centuries. We were able, now and then, to admit critics of the class when, like Politian in part of his work earlier, or Bentley later, they came actually within our range. But classical scholarship has lain more and more out of our path as the eighteenth century proceeded, and it was not till far into the nineteenth, and then but for a moment, that the two converged. The greatest results of this convergence in England were given by Professors Sellar and Nettleship, the former in his admirable series of works on the Roman Poets, the latter in the essays referred to above, and by Mr Pater in his dealing with Plato and other Greeks. Professor Munro, the greatest light of the younger University, touched literature rather less than pure scholarship, and may perhaps be thought to have been least infallible when he touched the former nearest. I had fully perceived the necessity for this exclusion before the appearance of Dr Sandys' admirable History of Classical Scholarship; but that book, though it has not, at the time I write, reached our present period or even that of our last volume, will serve to do what I cannot do as much better than I could have done it on this count as Mr Bosanquet’s on the other.