the other romantic beings which had inspired the modern mind to novel-writing,—­marching or gambolling, pride in their port, defiance in their eye, mischief in their purpose,—­and began so vigorous an attack upon their classic visitors and critics, that the latter were glad to betake themselves to the mighty-winged Pegasus, who rapidly bore them in retreat to the present home of the Dii Majores, that point of the empyrean directly above Olympus.

And well, indeed, might the Muses wonder at the rise of the novel and its vast developments, for the classic literature presents no similar works.  One of Plato’s dialogues or Aesop’s fables is as near an approach to a prose romance as antiquity in its golden eras can offer.  The few productions of the kind which appeared during the decline of literature in the early Christian centuries, as the “Golden Ass” of Apuleius and the “AEthiopica” of Heliodorus, were freaks of Nature, an odd growth rather than a distinct species, and are also to be contrasted rather than compared with the later novel.  Such as they are, moreover, they were produced under Christian as much as classic influences.  The aesthetic Hellenes admitted into their literature nothing so composite, so likely to be crude, as the romance.  Their styles of art were all pure, their taste delighted in simplicity and unity, and they strictly forbade a medley, alike in architecture, sculpture, and letters.  The history of their development opens with an epic yet unsurpassed, and their literary creations have been adopted to be the humanities of Christian universities.  A writer has recently proposed to account for their success in the arts from the circumstance that the features of Nature around them were small,—­that their hornet-shaped peninsula was cut by mountains and inlets of the sea into minute portions, which the mind could easily compass, the foot measure, and the hand improve,—­that therefore every hillock and fountain, every forest and by-way was peopled with mythological characters and made significant with traditions, and the cities were adorned with architectural and sculptured masterpieces.  Greece thus, like England in our own time, presented the character of a highly wrought piece of ground,—­England being the more completely developed for material uses, and Greece being the more heavily freighted with legends of ideal meaning.  Small-featured and large-minded Greece is thus set in contrast with Asia, where the mind and body were equally palsied in the effort to overcome immense plains and interminable mountain-chains.  But whatever the reason, whether geographical or ethnological, it is certain that the people of Greece were endowed with a transcendent genius for art, which embraced all departments of life as by an instinct.  Every divinity was made a plain figure to the mind, every mystery was symbolized in some positive beautiful myth, and every conception of whatever object became statuesque and clear.  This artistic character