For antiquarians Hesiod is no doubt a more useful poet than either Homer or Euripides. He differs from Homer in having a definite character and even an approximate date; from both Euripides and Homer in dealing with the concrete, everyday facts of contemporary life. It is from him, for instance, that we have our earliest account of a plough made artificially with separate pieces of wood; Homer never troubled his head with such banal matters, but here is a chance for the antiquarians to make merry. The Works and Days above all other works is the antiquarian's thesaurus.

But if we subtract Hesiod's descriptions of ploughs, his list of days and similar paragraphs which are admittedly boring, we are left with a good three-fourths of the Works and Days still intact. For example, we have the three λòγoi with which the poem begins. Here, if we expect the glitter of Homer, the ‘surge and thunder of the Odyssey’, we shall be disappointed; but we shall find that monstrous familiarity with the gods, and that astonishing intimacy with the universe before man's creation, which only Greek literature can show us. Shelley indeed, as Francis Thompson observed, had in some degree this Greek characteristic— ‘the universe is his box of toys… he dances in and out of the gates of heaven’—but only Hesiod and Aeschylus in the Prometheus have yet succeeded in opening up the full prospect of eternity. Hesiod knows the origin of everything, divine and human; he had the effrontery to write a Theogony, and knew the exact life history of the second sort of Strife: ‘she was born of dark gloomy Night, and high Zeus, who dwells in heaven, set her in the roots of earth’ (Works and Days, 11. 17–19).

Perhaps it is a little late to deprecate the decline of ‘Verses’. Nevertheless such of us as put our trust in a classical renaissance after the war cannot but hope that that branch of scholarship in which Britain was and still is pre-eminent will survive and flourish again in happier times.

In Lorna Doone John Ridd describes his second in his fight at Blundell's: ‘A rare ripe scholar he was, and now he hath routed up the Germans in the matter of criticism.’ It would be interesting to know who that contemporary of Bentley might have been, because we British do not appear to be cut out for ‘scholars’ in the formal sense. We have yet to produce a Madvig or a Cobet, and it is doubtful whether we ever shall. Constitutionally we are apt to be not so interested in externals as in internals; and once having learned Greek and Latin we wanted to write them and express great thoughts in them. So we invented ‘Verses’.

Wilamowitz, it is recorded, once attempted to compose a Greek iambic in order to illustrate a point of metre. The result was ludicrous. It is extraordinary how so great a scholar could have been so poor at manipulating the language. It is doubtful whether the author of the Prolegomena Xenophontea could have composed a set of verses in any wise comparable to those produced by Thomas Saunders Evans as a boy at Shrewsbury, and although the latter never exhibited the extreme form of precociousness which enabled the Dutch scholar to acquire an international reputation in the early twenties, the praise he once earned from his headmaster when announcing the winning copy of hexameters could hardly have been higher: ‘Gentlemen, the copy of verses which has been awarded the prize this year is worthy of Vergil!’ No wonder another copy of verses written by a Shrewsbury boy at that time and secreted among some Oxford papers won a University prize!