piece of English prose fiction that we have, is beyond all doubt derived ultimately from a Greek original of this very class:  and the class itself is an immense advance, in the novel direction, upon anything that we have before.  It is on the one hand essentially a “romance of adventure,” and on the other essentially a “love-story”—­in senses to which we find little in classical literature to correspond in the one case and still less in the other.  Instead of being, like Lucius and the Golden Ass, a tissue of stories essentially unconnected and little more than framed by the main tale, it is, though it may have a few episodes, an example of at least romantic unity throughout, with definite hero and definite heroine, the prominence and importance of the latter being specially noteworthy.  It is in fact the first division of literature in which the heroine assumes the position of a protagonist.  If it falls short in character, so do even later romances to a great extent:  if dialogue is not very accomplished, that also was hardly to be thoroughly developed till the novel proper came into being.  In the other two great divisions, incident and description, it is abundantly furnished.  And, above all, the two great Romantic motives, Adventure and Love, are quite maturely present in it.

To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to close quarters with our proper division, the origin of Romance itself is a very debatable subject, or rather it is a subject which the wiser mind will hardly care to debate much.  The opinion of the present writer—­the result, at least, of many years’ reading and thought—­is that it is a result of the marriage of the older East and the newer (non-classical) West through the agency of the spread of Christianity and the growth and diffusion of the “Saint’s Life.”  The beginnings of Hagiology itself are very uncertain:  but what is certain is that they are very early:  and that as the amalgamation or leavening of the Roman world with barbarian material proceeded, the spread of Christianity proceeded likewise.  The Vision of St. Paul—­one of the earliest examples and the starter it would seem, if not of the whole class of sacred Romances, at any rate of the large subsection devoted to Things after Death—­has been put as early as “before 400 A.D.”  It would probably be difficult to date such legends as those of St. Margaret and St. Catherine too early, having regard to their intrinsic indications:  and the vast cycle of Our Lady, though probably later, must have begun long before the modern languages were ready for it, while that of the Cross should be earlier still.  And let it be remembered that these Saints’ Lives, which are still infinitely good reading, are not in the least confined to homiletic necessities.  The jejuneness and woodenness from which the modern religious story too often suffers are in no way chargeable upon all, or even many, of them.  They have the widest range of incident—­natural as well as supernatural:  their touches of nature are indeed extended far beyond mere incident.  Purely comic episodes are by no means wanting:  and these, like the parallel passages in the dramatising of these very legends, were sure to lead to isolation of them, and to a secular continuation.