“This work,” (observes Mr Douce,) “was certainly not published nor translated in the time of Luigi da Porto, the original narrator of the story of Romeo and Juliet:  but there is no reason why he might not have seen a copy of the original in MS. We might enumerate several more of these later productions of the same school; but a separate analysis of each would be both tedious and needless, as none present any marked features of distinction from those already noticed.  They are all, more or less, indifferent copies either from Heliodorus or Achilles Tatius; the outline of the story being generally borrowed from one or the other of these sources, while in point of style, nearly all appear to have taken as their model the florid rhetorical display and artificial polish of language which characterize the latter.  Their redeeming point is the high position uniformly assigned to the female characters, who are neither immured in the Oriental seclusion of the harem, nor degraded to household drudges, like the Athenian ladies in the polished age of Pericles:[9] but mingle without restraint in society as the friends and companions of the other sex, and are addressed in the language of admiration and respect.  But these pleasing traits are not sufficient to atone for the improbability of the incidents, relieved neither by the brilliant fancy of the East, nor the lofty deeds of the romances of chivalry:  and the reader, wearied by the repetition of similar scenes and characters, thinly disguised by change of name and place, finds little reason to regret that “the children of the marriage of Theagenes and Chariclea,” as these romances are termed by a writer quoted by d’Israeli in the “Curiosities of Literature”—­have not continued to increase and multiply up to our own times.

[8] Some bibliographers have assigned it to Photius; but the opinion of Achilles Tatius expressed by the patriarch, and quoted at the commencement of this article, precludes the possibility of its being from his pen.

    [9] See Mitford’s History of Greece, ch. xiii, sect. 1.

* * * * *

THE NEW ART OF PRINTING.

BY A DESIGNING DEVIL.

    “Aliter non fit, avite, liber.”—­MARTIAL.

It is more than probable that, at the first discovery of that mightiest of arts, which has so tended to facilitate every other—­the art of printing—­many old-fashioned people looked with a jealous eye on the innovation.  Accustomed to a written character, their eyes became wearied by the crabbedness and formality of type.  It was like travelling on the paved and rectilinear roads of France, after winding among the blooming hedgerows of England; and how dingy and graceless must have appeared the first printed copy of the Holy Bible, to those accustomed to luxuriate in emblazoned missals, amid all the pride, pomp, and vellum of glorious MS.!