Page:Xenophon by Alexander Grant.djvu/190

180 eccentricity and from all excessive specialty of mind, allowed his writings to attain to a sort of national and universal standard, rather than an individual character. And so it has come about that the model of classical Greek prose is considered to be preserved, not in the laboured antithetical greatness of the style of Thucydides, nor in the lovely half-poetical diction of Plato, but in the everyday sentences which make up the page of Xenophon. Not only are these the study of the English schoolboy, but the newspaper writers of Athens at the present day, in hopes of reviving some of the classical purity of the ancients, are said to be diligently engaged in teaching the corrupt modern Greek language to copy Xenophon.