when he examined in the sunshine what he had written by lamplight, he made up his mind to destroy his love-scenes, but was prevented by a friend.  He admits, too, that Christianity refined the relations between the sexes; yet he thinks it “quite conceivable that a Greek heart should have felt as tenderly, as longingly as a Christian heart,” and he refers to a number of romantic stories invented by the Greeks as proof that they knew love in our sense of the word—­such stories as Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche, Homer’s portrait of Penelope, Xenophon’s tale of Panthea and Abradates.

“Can we assume even the gallantry of love to have been unknown in a country where the hair of a queen, Berenice, was transferred as a constellation to the skies; or can devotion to love be doubted in the case of peoples who, for the sake of a beautiful woman, wage terrible wars with bitter pertinacity?”

Hegel’s episodic suggestion referred to in our first chapter regarding the absence of romantic love in ancient Greek literature having thus failed to convince even his own countrymen, it was natural that my revival of that suggestion, as a detail of my general theory of the evolution of love, should have aroused a chorus of critical dissent.  Commenting on my assertion that there are no stories of romantic love in Greek literature, an editorial writer in the London Daily News exclaimed:  “Why, it would be less wild to remark that the Greeks had nothing but love-stories.”  After referring to the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice, Meleager and Atalanta, Alcyone and Ceyx, Cephalus and Procris, the writer adds,

“It is no exaggeration to say that any school-girl could tell Mr. Finck a dozen others.”  “The Greeks were human beings, and had the sentiments of human beings, which really vary but little....”

The New York Mail and Express also devoted an editorial article to my book, in which it remarked that if romantic love is, as I claim, an exclusively modern sentiment,

“we must get rid of some old-fashioned fancies.  How shall we hereafter classify our old friends Hero and Leander?  Leander was a fine fellow, just like the handsomest boy you know.  He fell in love with the lighthouse-keeper’s daughter[!] and used to swim over the river[!] every night and make love to her.  It was all told by an old Greek named Musaeus.  How did he get such modern notions into his noddle?  How, moreover, shall we classify Daphnis and Chloe?  This fine old romance of Longus is as sweet and beautiful a love-story as ever skipped in prose.”

“Daphnis and Chloe,” wrote a New Haven critic, “is one of the most idyllic love-stories ever written.”  “The love story of Hero and Leander upsets this author’s theory completely,” said a Rochester reviewer, while a St. Louis critic declared boldly that “in the pages of Achilles Tatius and Theodorus, inventors of the modern novel, the young men and maidens loved as romantically as in Miss Evans’s latest.”  A Boston censor pronounced my theory “simply absurd,” adding: