it is well known that the story of Isfendiyar, and of the daring deeds of the Persian hero Rustan, in love and war,[50] are to this day more popular in those regions than the tales of Hercules, Roland, or Amadis de Gaul, ever were with us.  And so decidedly is Asia the parent of these fictions, that we shall find on examination, that nearly all those who in early times distinguished themselves as writers of what are now called romances, were of oriental birth or extraction.  Clearchus, a pupil of Aristotle, and the first who attempted any thing of the sort in the Greek language, was a native of Soli in Cilicia:—­Jamblichus was a Syrian, as were also Heliodorus and Lucian, the former being of Emessa, the latter of Samosata:—­Achilles Tatius was an Alexandrian; and the rule will be found to hold good in other instances, with scarcely a single exception.”

[Footnote 50:  The exploits of these and other paladins of the Kaianian dynasty, the heroic age of Persian history, are now known to us principally through the Shah-Nameh of Ferdousi, a poem bearing date only at the beginning of the eleventh century; but both this and its predecessor, the Bostan-Nameh, were founded on ballads and [Greek:  rhapsodiai] of far distant ages, which had escaped the ravages of time and the Mohammedans, and some of which are even now preserved among the ancient tribes of pure Persian descent, in the S.W. provinces of the kingdom.  Sir John Malcolm (History of Persia, ii. 444, note, 8vo. ed.,) gives an amusing anecdote of the effect produced among his escort by one of these popular chants.]

Such is the doctrine laid down (at somewhat greater length than we have rendered it) by the learned Huetius, in his treatise De Origine Fabularum Romanensium; and from the general principle therein propounded, we are certainly by no means inclined to dissent.  But while fully admitting that it is to the vivid fancy and picturesque imagination of the Orientals that we owe the origin of all those popular legends which have penetrated, under various changes of costume, into every corner of Europe,[51] as well as those more gorgeous creations which appear, interwoven with the ruder creations of the northern nations, to have furnished the groundwork of the fabliaux and lais of the chivalry of the middle ages:—­we still hold that the invention of the romance of ordinary life, in which the interest of the story depends upon occurrences in some measure within the bounds of probability, and in which the heroes and heroines are neither invested with superhuman qualities, nor extricated from their difficulties by supernatural means, must be ascribed to a more European state of society than that which produced those tales of wonder, which are commonly considered as characteristic of the climes of the East.  Even the authors enumerated by the learned bishop of Avranches himself, in the passage above quoted, were all denizens of the Greek cities of Asia