complete, the “Pastorals, or Daphnis and Chloe” of Longus—­a work in itself of no particular merits or demerits as a literary composition, but noted for its unparalleled depravity, and further remarkable as the first of the class of pastoral romances, which were almost as rife in Europe during the middle ages as novels of fashionable life are, for the sins of this generation, at the present day.  There only remain to be enumerated the three precious farragos entitled “The Ephesiacs, or Habrocomas and Anthia”—­“the Babylonics”—­and “the Cypriacs”—­said to be from the pen of three different Xenophons, of whose history nothing, not even the age in which any of them lived, can be satisfactorily made out—­though the uniformity of stupid extravagance, not less than the similarity of name, would lead a priori to the conclusion that one luckless wight must have been the author of all three.  From this list of the Byzantine romances, (in which we are not sure that one or two may not after all have been omitted,) it will be seen that Heliodorus had a tolerably numerous progeny, even in his own language, to answer for; though we fear we must concur in the sweeping censure of a Quarterly Reviewer, (vol. x. p. 301,) who condemns then en masse, with the single exception of the “Ethiopics” of the last-named author, as “a few tiresome stories, absolutely void of taste, invention, or interest; without influence even upon the declining literature of their own age, and in all probability quite unknown to the real forerunners of Richardson, Fielding, and Rousseau.”

[Footnote 52:  The principal adventures of Clitophon and Leucippe consist in being twice taken by pirates on the banks of the Nile, as Theagenes and Chariclea are in the Ethiopics.]

A work thus excepted, by common consent, from the general reprobation is which all its compeers are involved, must deserve some notice from its negative, if not from its positive merits; and the particulars which have been preserved of its literary history are also somewhat curious.  Even in these days, when almost every other individual is a novelist, either in esse or in embryo, the announcement of a love-story from the pen of a bishop would create what is called “a considerable sensation”—­though perhaps it would hardly draw down on the author such condign and summary punishment as was inflicted by the straitlaced Kirk of Scotland, less than a century ago, on one of her ministers, for the high crime and misdemeanour of having indited “a stage play, called the Tragedy of Douglas."[53] Yet not only the “Ethiopics,” but the best known of its successors, the “Clitophon and Leucippe” of Achilles Tatius, are both universally asserted to have been juvenile productions of ecclesiastics who afterwards attained the episcopal dignity:  and the former, if we may credit the Ecclesiastical History of Nicephorus, fared not much better at the hands of the Provincial Synod of Thessaly than did