THREE:If our critic found so little to admire in Hellas, still less did he seek for the realisation of his dreams in the outlying world. The lessons of Protagoras had not been wasted on him, and, unlike the nature-worshippers of the eighteenth century, he never fell into the delusion that wisdom and virtue had their home in primaeval forests or in corrupt Oriental despotisms. For him, Greek civilisation, with all its faults, was the best thing that human nature had produced, the only hearth of intellectual culture, the only soil where new experiments in education and government could be tried. He could go down to the roots of thought, of language, and of society; he could construct a new style, a new system, and a new polity, from the foundation up; he could grasp all the tendencies that came under his immediate observation, and follow them out to their utmost possibilities of expansion; but his vast powers of analysis and generalisation remained subject to this restriction, that a Hellene he was and a Hellene he remained to the end.For the moment all they knew was that the Germans were in the town, as none of them yet had ventured outside the building. At present their great fear was that Germans might be billeted on them.... Oh! they might take everything if only they did not come themselves.
