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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: therefore, in a great degree, of our modern eighteenth century poets;
not a useless excellence, seeing that it is, on the whole, good for him
who writes to see clearly what he wants to say, and to be able to make
his readers see it clearly also. And yet one natural strain is heard
amid all this artificial jingle--that of Theocritus. It is not
altogether Alexandrian. Its sweetest notes were learnt amid the
chestnut groves and orchards, the volcanic glens and sunny pastures of
Sicily; but the intercourse, between the courts of Hiero and the
Ptolemies seems to have been continual. Poets and philosophers moved
freely from one to the other, and found a like atmosphere in both; and
in one of Theocritus' idyls, two Sicilian gentlemen, crossed in love,
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