There was nothing left of the freshness, vivacity,
invention, and careless faith in the present which make many of the
productions of the Norman Trouveres delightful reading even now. The
whole of Europe during the fifteenth century produced no book which has
continued readable, or has become in any sense of the word a classic. I
do not mean that that century has left us no illustrious names, that it
was not enriched with some august intellects who kept alive the apostolic
succession of thought and speculation, who passed along the still
unextinguished torch of intelligence, the _lampada vitae_, to those who
came after them. But a classic is properly a book which maintains itself
by virtue of that happy coalescence of matter and style, that innate and
exquisite sympathy between the thought that gives life and the form that
consents to every mood of grace and dignity, which can be simple without
being vulgar, elevated without being distant, and which is something
neither ancient nor modern, always new and incapable of growing old. It
is not his Latin which makes Horace cosmopolitan, nor can Beranger's
French prevent his becoming so. No hedge of language however thorny, no
dragon-coil of centuries, will keep men away from these true apples of
the Hesperides if once they have caught sight or scent of them.
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