Page:Leechdoms wortcunning and starcraft of early England volume 1.djvu/23



will be difficult for the kindliest temper to give a friendly welcome to the medical philosophy of Saxon days. As man has an ever recurring proneness to make himself the standard of truth, to condemn, sneer at, and despise all that he does not choose or is unable to comprehend, so in a greater degree every generation of men admires its own wisdom, skill, science, art, and progress; it calls its own, whatever it has learnt from men of former days, and counts the few improvements which have had their birth in its own time, as triumphs and distinctions which elevate it above all the past.

If we consider the history of the ages gone by, these high pretensions will soon abate somewhat of their confidence. The progress of those contrivances towards our comfort, which we sum up in the term civilization, has been very creeping and laborious. Our great capitals are smaller than Rome, the fortunes of our men of millions are trifles to the wealth of a Crassus or a Lucullus, our houses are less carefully warmed in winter than the Roman villas, our poetry has no Homeros, our sculpture no Praxiteles, our architecture no Parthenon, our philosophy has never seen a century such as that between Perikles and Alexandros, those hundred years of Attic wit and wisdom have given us an education in dead languages, and in the lore and manners of two thousand years since, and are driving our native words from off our tongues and making them strange to our ears.