except it die. The decay of an old literature is the antecedent condition for a new mode of intellectual life. This old poetic genius of sublimity and fury, waning before the Conquest, disappears after it, to emerge once more when the wounds have closed and the saps have mingled. Till then, the current that flows shallow and fantastic above ground is of French origin. What was this new literature, by which a broader spreading and a more generous vine should spring from the regenerated root of the old stock? Romantic fiction, Its origin. The child personifies the stone that hurts him, and his first impulse is to resent the injury as if he imagined it to be endowed with consciousness and to be acting with design. The childhood of superstition personifies each individual exist ence, the plant and the rock. The childhood of philosophy personifies the universe. The barbarian is fascinated by the incomprehensible. Unable to assign, for a natural phenomenon, a cause within nature, he has recourse to a living personality enshrined in it. To every grotto he gives a genius; to every tree, river, spring, a divinity. Out of the darkness he cannot tell what alarming spectre may emerge. Everywhere he is a believer in sorcery, witchcraft, enchantments. In an advanced stage of development, he conceives a number of personal beings distinct from the material creation, which preside over the different provinces of nature,―the sea, the air, the winds, the streams, the heavens, and assume the guardianship of individuals, tribes, and nations. Remembering this tendency for personification which marks the early life of man, his necessity of referring effects to their causes, and his interpretation of things according to outward appearances, we shall better understand how the Hours, the Dawn, and the Night, with her black mantle bespangled with stars, came to receive their forms; how the clouds were sacred cattle driven to their milking, or sheep of the golden fleece; how the fall of the dew was the shedding of divine tears, and the fatal sun-shafts the arrows of Apollo shot from his golden bow; how the west, where the sun and stars go down, was the portal of descent to hell, and the morning twilight a reflection from the Elysian Fields; how the eruptions of the volcano were due to the throes of the agonized giant, vainly struggling to rise; how earthquakes, famine, hail, snow, and tempests were the work of supernatural fiends; how the traditions of every land are replete with the exploits of gods, magicians, and devils. Further, under the operation of this principle, a similarity of imagery will exist wherever there exists a resemblance in the objects calling it forth; and a multitude of the symbols thus brought into circulation will be found recurring, like the primitive roots of a language, in almost every country, as common property inherited by descent. Thus, a mound of earth becomes the sepulchre of a favorite hero; a pile of enormous stones, the labor of a giant; a single one, the stupendous instrument of daily exercise to a fabled king; the figure of a rock, proof of some deity's wrath or presence,-the foot-print of Hercules or the weeping Niobe: every one, of Aryan blood, knows that the moon is inhabited by a man with a bundle of sticks on his back, exiled thither many centuries, and so far away that he is beyond the reach of death; from the remotest period, the rod has been employed in divination; in Bohemia, in Scotland, in Switzerland, in Iceland, in North America, is the story of some Rip Van Winkle who slumbers while years or ages glide by like a watch in the night; and of that great mystery of human life which is an enigma never solved, and ever originating speculation, is born the myth of the Wandering Jew. Consider, again, how incidents change by distance, and we by age. How a thing grows in memory when love or hate is there to idealize it! The philosophic Agis had to console his desponding countrymen with a remark which every man's experience has made familiar,- that 'the fading virtues of later times were a cause of grief to his father, who in turn had listened to the same regrets from his own venerable sire.' Washington, whose picture even now transcends the fact, would be a myth, had there been no books. In the days of Alfred, golden bracelets hung untouched in the open road. In the native vigor of the youthful world, a thousand years are given to the life of man. The national hero, through the lengthened vista, acquires a gigantic stature. The body of Orestes when found measured seven cubits, and the sandals of Perseus two. How prismatic must be the imagination, when the national mind, as here, is yet in the fresh young radiance of hope and wonder, as of the young child's thoughts in the wild lion-hearts of men. Time is a camera obscura, through which a man, if great while living, becomes ten-fold greater when dead. Henceforward he exists to society by some shining trait of beauty or utility which he had; and, borrowing his proportions from the one fine feature, we finish the portrait symmetrically. That feature is the small real star that gleams out of the dark vortex of the ages through the madness of rioting fancy and the whirlwind-chaos of images, expanding, according to the glass it shines through, into wondrous thousand-fold form and color. Such is the foundation of fiction in general; originating as a whole from no single point as to country or to time, but in part springing from common organic causes, and in part travelling from region to region, on airy wing scattering the seeds of its wild flowers imperceptibly over the world, from the gorgeous East to the virgin West and the frozen North. Its radical types, much as the root-words of speech, are amplified and compounded to meet the demands of new occasions, transferred from one subject to another, and embellished according to the taste, temper, and resources of the artist. Thus, the Macedonian conqueror and his contemporaries are accoutred in the garb of feudalism, and his wars transformed into chivalrous adventures. The Naiads of Greece differ only in name from the Nixen of Germany, and the Norwegian Thor is brother to Olympian Jove. The Persian Goblet of the Sun reappears as the horn of the Celtic Bran, producing whatever liquor is called for; or as the Saint Graal, of the Round Table,- for which is reserved the 'Seat Perilous,' the miraculous cup, the giver of sumptuous banquets, the healer of maladies, to the pure the interpreter of the will of Heaven. The magic ship of Odin, which could be folded like a handkerchief, becomes, under the play of Homeric fancy, selfdirecting and prophetic: So shalt thou instant reach the realm assign'd, In wondrous ships, self-moved, instinct with mind: The story of Jack and Jill is a venerable one in Icelandic mythology, and Jack and the Beanstalk has found eager listeners in Africa, as in every quarter of Europe. All the machinery of the Iliad is reproduced in the legend of Charlemagne, and if in his case myth were not controlled and rectified by history, he would be for us, under his adventitious ornaments, as unreal as Agamemnon. Thus the popular literature of the Middle Ages, indigenous and imported, fostered by a like credulity, vision, and mystery, was invested with the same tissue of marvels,— personified and supernatural agents, heroes, elves, fairies, dwarfs, giants, enchanters, spells, charms, and amulets. Written in the Romance dialects principally in French and Italian-tales of dimly remembered kings, of marvellous agency and gallant daring, are hence designated as Romances; and differ from the similar productions of antiquity chiefly in a change of names and places, with an admixture of the refinement and pageantry of feudal religion and manners. Its themes. During a long period, saintly legends, in which self-torture was the chief measure of excellence, formed the guiding ideals of Christendom; and the first romances were little more than legends of devotion, containing the pilgrimage of an old warrior. As chivalry grew in splendor and fascination, martial exploits were added to his youth, his religious shaded into the heroic character, and the penitent was lost in the knight-errant. Penance, which was the governing image of the one, gradually became the remote sequel of the other, till it was almost an established rule of romance for the knight to end his days in a hermitage. By the reactionary influence of worship, valor was consecrated, and a Christian soul gave tone and coloring to the whole body of romantic fiction. Thus the Holy Graal, in the midst of the bright animal life of the Arthur legends, became a type of the mystery of Godliness. Whatever impure man sat in the Seat Perilous the earth swallowed. When men became sinful, it, visible only to pure eyes, disappeared; and in the quest for it, only the spotless Sir Galahad succeeded. A general homage to the fair, independent of personal attachment, forms a distinguishing and most important element of mediæval romance. This also, in its best development, was the offspring of the Christian dispensation. True, as we have seen, its rudiments already existed in the deference paid to the female sex by the Teutons, who believed some divine quality to be inherent in their women. Thus Tacitus relates that Velleda, a German prophetess, held, frequent conferences with the Roman generals; and on some occasions, on account of the sacredness of her person, subduing influence of her spell, blending strangely with every excess of violence and every outburst of superstition. Of an Irish chieftain-the most ferocious that ever defied the English power-it is related, amid a legion of horrible crimes, that, sitting at meat, before he put one morsel into his mouth, he would slice a portion above the daily alms, and send it to some beggar at the gate, saying it was meet to serve Christ first.' The monastic bodies that everywhere arose, were an invaluable counterpoise to military violence; pioneers in most forms of peaceful labor; green spots in a wilderness of rapine and tumult, where the feeble and persecuted could find refuge. As secure repositories for books, when libraries were almost unknown, they bridged the chaos of the Middle Ages, and linked the two periods of ancient and modern civilization. The Church peopled the imagination with forms of tender beauty and gentle pathos, which—more than any dogmatic teaching-softened and transformed the character, till it learned to realize the sanctity of weakness and the majesty of compassion. The lowliness and sorrow of her Founder, the grace of His person, the agonies of Gethsemane or of Calvary, the gentleness of the Virgin Mother, are the pictures which, for eighteen hundred years, have inspired the hearts of men with an impassioned love, formed the governing ideals of the rudest and most ignorant, furnished the highest patterns of virtue and the strongest incentives to its practice. Here, in the character and example of the crucified Nazarene, Christianity finds an enduring principle of regeneration, by which, though shrouded by disastrous eclipse or dimmed. by passing mist, her light is never quenched,-by which, when luxury, ambition, worldliness and vice have wounded her wellnigh to death, she has renewed her strength like the eagle, has run and not been weary, has walked and not been faint. So has her mightiest apology, from age to age, been lives of holiness and fidelity; and never, though she seemed to be dying, has she lacked such. Side by side with those who lived and schemed in ecclesiastical politics as their chosen element, were men to whom worldly honors were indifferent, to whose meekness and selfdenial, more than to diadem, tiara, sword, or logic, she owes her empire over the human heart. Learning. From the age of Augustus, Latin and Greek |