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But the general beauty of them all is, that they are so perfectly characteristical. The spirit of "learning and of chivalry," of which union, Spenser has entitled Sydney to have been the "president," shines through them. I confess I can see nothing of the "jejune" or "frigid" in them; much less of the "stiff" and "cumbrous" which I have sometimes heard objected to the Arcadia.
Wretched emasculator of his own reason, whose jejune timidity and want of vitality are thus omnipresent in the most secret chambers of his heart! "We can forgive a man for almost any falsehood provided we feel that he was under strong temptation and well knew that he was deceiving.
Or rather, there are times when his Doric simplicity of style seems jejune beside the flowing periods and picturesque details of Lescarbot. No better illustration of this difference in style, arising from fundamental difference in temperament, can be found than the description which each gives of the Ordre de Bon Temps.
We want also to keep classics and especially Greek as the bountiful source of material and of colour, decoration for the jejune lives of common men. If classics cease to be generally taught and become the appanage of a few scholars, the gulf between the literary and the scientific will be made still wider. Milton will need more explanatory notes than O. Henry.
Professor Huxley holds up to scorn mediæval education, with its neglect of the knowledge of nature, its poverty even of literary studies, its formal logic devoted to "showing how and why that which the Church said was true must be true." But the great mediæval Universities were not brought into being, we may be sure, by the zeal for giving a jejune and contemptible education.
The composers of the French court willingly sacrificed musical to declamatory interest, and thus, while they steered clear of the mere tunefulness which was the rock on which Italian composers made shipwreck, they fell into the opposite extreme and wrote works which seem to us arid and jejune.
However new and disturbing to his father were these flashes of the New Learning, in his outward conduct he was orthodox and extremely well-behaved. The spiritual exercises of the Revd. Howel had become jejune, and limited very much by his failing sight. The recovery after the operation had come too late in life to bring about any expansion of public or private devotions.
Contrasted with the inconceivable antiquity of this modest fossil, those other things were flippantly modern jejune mere matters of day-before-yesterday. The sense of the oldness of the Cathedral vanished away under the influence of this truly venerable presence. St. Mark's is monumental; it is an imperishable remembrancer of the profound and simple piety of the Middle Ages.
It was not only that his Greek scholarship was deficient, but he lacked patience, an indispensable virtue for the translator. His real original was not the Greek text at all, but the Latin version of Joshua Barnes; and when this appeared to him jejune and unpoetic he sometimes created an original of his own.
In fact, to epitomise all these antitheses in one, he is the heir of an old barbarian monarchy and also the founder of a new Empire. The story of his conquests reads like the epitome of a lost romance so varied are the incidents, so jejune the details afforded by contemporary sources.
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