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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: The question of a reading, or a grammatical form, or an accent, or the uses
of a word, took the place of the aim or subject of the book. He had no
sense of the beauties of an author, and very little light is thrown by him
on real difficulties. He interprets past ages by his own. The greatest
classical writers are the least appreciated by him. This seems to be the
reason why so many of them have perished, why the lyric poets have almost
wholly disappeared; why, out of the eighty or ninety tragedies of Aeschylus
and Sophocles, only seven of each had been preserved.
Such an age of sciolism and scholasticism may possibly once more get the
better of the literary world. There are those who prophesy that the signs
of such a day are again appearing among us, and that at the end of the
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