It is a just cause of regret, that, both the Greeks and the Romans should have struck on Fiction, a mine of inexhaustible richness, only at the moment when Genius, like a lamp whose flame has burnt out the oil which fed it, threw a blaze of effulgent, but expiring light, soon to be succeeded by five centuries of total darkness! we the squalid vestments assumed to de-expresses) are the epics of private, ceive, a dread avenger, he lashes, domestic life. In the portraitures of with the serpents of the Furies, the re- that life we delight, because morseless parricide, the vile charioteer, live over endearing remembrances, the unskilful musician, the uninspired touching associations, and by-gone versifier. Thus it is that his satire, in- emotions; for the illusions evoked by stead of breathing the bitter, but al- the great novelists of our own day, ways decorous irony of Horace, flows are embodied with an art so resemwith the implacable rage of Juvenal, bling nature, that its spell obliterates the ponderous strength of Perseus. even the consciousness of the realities of the present. But such scenes of domestic felicities, so strongly impressing our mind, never could have thus swayed that of the ancients. Their infancy had not treasured them up in the tablets of young memory. The home, the fireside, the endearments of the parental board-the charities, the religion of the hearth (if we may be allowed the expression)-those sacred springs which, flowing into the youthful heart, become the fountains of undying remembrances, did not exist, for the nations of antiquity, such as they dwell in our memory, ineffaceably impressed. There is no Family-in the sense we connect with that word-where woman does not preside over the domestic circle in all the grace and dignity of her nature. In Greece, the virtuous matron's mind was purposely left uncultivated. Without being able to fix the precise epoch when Longus lived, we are borne out by good authority when asserting Daphnis and Chloë to be the last of the master works by which Greece, whether subdued by the invincible legions of Rome, or enslaved by the Janissaries of the Sultans, lived, and will for ever live, the teacher of all sciences, of all those arts, too, the embellishers of social existence, in which, though Italy has twice rivalled her, she never was surpassed by any other nation. The Satyricon of Petronius, amidst all the beauties and graces of composition that have in part redeemed its faults, bears already the stamp of a precocious decrepitude of taste a senility wrought on the literature of imperial Rome, not by years, but by the uncurbed licentiousness of the epoch. The genius of the Greeks was of a cast well adapted to novel-writing; made observant of nature by their love of the arts sacred to its imitation, they were no less alive to the minuter shades of individual character. Of these combined powers, we need no better evidence than the masterly delineations of the rural sceneries amidst which Longus has made the lovely children, the subjects of his tale, to wander, innocent and playful as the lambs and kids of their flocks: and the gradual unfoldings of their imaginings, under the tuition of nature and love alone. And yet we are inclined to believe, that had the most gifted of the writers of Greece, even in the golden age of her literary glory, attempted novel writing, they would have failed. Novels (we use the word in the sense it now The coarseness of Xanthippe, a rude, vituperative gossip, drove Socrates to the feet of Aspasia, the first Grecian female who had cultivated not only the arts, but eloquence and philosophywho is termed, by Plato, the preceptress of Socrates; and who not only taught eloquence to Pericles, but composed the most impressive of his harangues, the celebrated Funeral Oration. But the people who had built temples to beauty, and raised altars to the Graces, crowned the triad nymphs only with ephemeral roses. The laurel, the ivy, the palms of unfading verdure, they reserved for heroes and poets. The name of one Grecian woman only has come down to us among those of the masters of the lyre; and that name-so have willed the envious fates-has floated over the abyss of centuries on the wings of a single song-but that song so sweet, so melodious, that it is alone sufficient to sustain the fame of the Lesbian muse. In Sparta, there was, in the literal sense of the expression, not one private house. The citizens eat together, at the same table; and the children, by a patriotic fiction, were held to be the offspring of the Republic, not of their natural parents. In Athens, in Rom e too, rational conversations were held, like debates on state affairs, under the Porches of Temples, or in public gardens. The History of Greece has recorded the name of no one woman, with unqualified praise. Electra, held up by tragic poets as an example of filial love, like one of the Furies that prompted Orestes to parricide, urges incessantly her brother to avenge a father's murder in a mother's blood. All the women mentioned by Petronius, in the Satyricon, are infamous. The Chloë of Longus's Pastoral is but a child; and the same nymphs, and naiads, who had watched over the helpless foundling, preserved the lovely Virgin, fair as the blossoms of their balmy groves, pure as the crystal streams of their fountains. One matron, however, is brought on the scene; and immediately darkens it by the impurity of her purpose. A society deprived of the grace, the amenities, the charm of female agency, necessarily loses the endless variety, the ever awakened interest, the complexity of incidents which, in the system of polite intercourse, in all the relations of modern civilized life, offer to the novelist materials so abundant, so diversified, so continually modified or changed, that the luxuriant and prolific fancy of Scott has only worked, through thirty volumes, the surface of the mine. When genius, learning, and the arts, after languishing in Byzantium, where Constantine had raised the cross on the Dome of St. Sophia, in defiance of the eagle of the Capitol, had passed, together with victory and power (her twin offspring), from the shores of the Hellespont, to the banks of the Euphrates, the sacred fire was not extinguished. The Greeks, who had preserved it, not fiercely burning as in the pages of Homer, but still capable, though reduced to a mere spark, to rekindle another conflagration through regenerated Europe, carried it first to Bagdad, and there with vestal solicitude kept alive the holy flame. In the reign of Haroun al Raschid, when the ferocity of the earlier Caliphs had been softened by the influence of wealth, and of the arts it both creates and fosters, the writings of the great masters of antiquity, were studied by a race of men emulous of the fame of those immortal teachers. Poetry spread over the traditions of the heroic times of the nomad Arabs, her ennobling and gorgeous vestments. The sciences flourished together with the arts. While amused with the dreams of alchymy, the Saracens laid the ground-work of chemistry. In the pursuit of a shadow, they grasped the most real, tangible, substantial of all human science. By the invention of their admirable signs of numbers; by the discovery of Algebra too, they gave to Astronomy the wings on which she has since followed the gyrating planets; nay, the blazing comets, in their wayward course through space. A people whose native enthusiasm for the marvellous had been made more intensely vivid by the rapidity with which they had spread their dominion from Mecca to Cairo-from the Euphrates to the Indus-from Grenada to the very walls of Constantinople-a people who had exchanged, suddenly, the tent for the Alhambra; the wilderness of the stony Arabia, for the flowery groves of Mesopotamia; the thatched huts of the Atlas for the marble palaces of Bagdad-such a people could not rest satisfied with the marvellous of historical truth. Even the heroic ages of Greece palled on the fancy of men almost the contemporaries of Mahomet, Omar, Ali, Othman; and of the invinci ble Amrou, the "sword of God." What was Romulus, the founder of a state engaged four centuries in the task of subduing some nameless Italian Republics, waging two wars of varied fortune for the mastery of Sicily? What were Lycurgus, Solon, Minos, those lawgivers of countries they could scarely discover on the maps of their giant empire? What were they all, compared with Mahomet, a prophet, a poet, a law-giver, a king, a conqueror? To feed the longings of such a people for events still more wondrous than those which had filled the world with the fame of their arms, to charm on earth the leisure hours of warriors, panting for the embraces in Paradise of blue-eyed houris, the betrothed brides of the soldier who had died in battle, a mighty necromancer evoked Fiction! She came, young, untrammeled, vague, undefined like their desert-impetuous like the simooms of their oceans of impalpable sand. She came, bringing with her the lores of all nations. There, the worshippers of fire; here, cities of marble, with a whole population of petrified inhabitants. She had dwelt in China; travelled over India, visited that mysterious valley of Thibet, the scene of marvellous tales. The tribes of genii, fairies, wizards of dread power, Peris basking in the sunbeams, spirits of seas, lakes, and woods-magicians with words of resistless sway compeling nature to change her laws-ghoules, with features of houris, but feeding obscenely on the putrid dead; all these, a motley pageantry of inhabitants of air, earth, seas and rivers, followed her footsteps: all these the potent enchanter controlled; and they, at his bidding, controlled the elements. His, the actual possession of the lamp obtained by the feigned Aladdin. That lamp (the genius burnling within his inspired breast), built palaces, and filled the deep caverns of earth with gems of bright hues, and effulgent rays. His, too, the enchanted carpet, on which, swifter than the horse, fleeter than the tempest, he journeyed over earth, sea, and air! With Sinbad, the bold voyager, he raised the venturous sail on every sea, touched at every coast, and from each brought, as return cargoes, tales of wonder, so fraught with power to charm and persuade, that the judgment of the hearers, astonished and perplexed, can no longer distinguish the illusion which comes from the reality which recedes; and yet, the author (for it is impossible that a book bearing in every page the impress of unity, both of design and of execution, should have been manufactured by a joint company, a corporation of tale writers), the author, we say, on the measureless stage, where are acted his thousand and one dramas, has brought but two or three women of unblemished character! His females are slaves. They come to amuse their masters. They play on various instruments, they sing, they dance; nay, the fair Sultana herself whose imaginings fill four volumes, pursues her narrative with her eyes steadily fixed on the unsheathed cimeter which, if the caprice of the father of the believers should so will it, may, at one fell blow, cut asunder, both the thread of her own life, and that too, spun by fairies out of silk and purest gold, of her wondrous tales. The dire incantations of Circe, which made the moon bloody, like the heart of a slaughtered victim, the mighty spell wrought by the art of Medea, these portentous visions of Grecian poets, fill the mind with superstitious dread; those of the Arabian Romancer excite alternate astonishment and delight; but they equally fail to bring, from the hidden spring of the heart, the tears of pity. They never portray true love; No! true love never descended from heaven to dwell on earth, in the Harem of a Sultan. It never inhabited the heart of the husband of many wives. In the gloom of his seraglio, the wretch ever remains a stranger to that home, which a Christian woman alone can make for man a Paradise on Earth! Fiction, the eleventh muse, not long after the pastoral of Longus had shone on the horizon, a parting ray of the setting sun of Grecian genius, fell into that deep, death-like sleep, which, during five centuries, held Europe in a torpor of all intellectual energies. Not even in the history of eastern nations do we find so wide a chasm in the annals of the human mind! Together with her sister muses, the fair enchantress was awakened by the soft music of the Troubadour's harp. She came, reposed, not weakened by this sleep of centuries. The Renard Subtile, the Cunning Fox, a production to which France and Belgium lay antagonistical claims, a satirical romance, of the school of Petronius, may be considered as the first work of Fiction, produced during the medieval ages, for it preceded the Decameron. It was the first dawning of the coming sun, still under the horizon, but already sending profuse to earth the purple rays of celestial light. It was the rainbow, the emblem of the softening of Heaven's wrath,-the harbinger of another alliance between matter and spirit! More than a century after, appeared the Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which are strangely blended wit, satire, unrivalled humour, and the vilest filth and obscenity. And yet, with all its nauseous deformities, he knows neither the spirit, the deep and wondrous erudition, the wild aspirations of the interesting age which the Gargantua portrays, nor the varied attainments of one of the most gifted of men, who has not read, nay, studied with the aid of the criticisms that have lighted it, a production, purposely made obscure by its author. That extraordinary book was the pre. cursor of printing, of Columbus's discoveries, and the fruit of the study of the classic works, which the Greeks had brought to Italy, after the conquest of Constantinople by Mahomet the Second-a book whose tendencies, and latent purpose, the civil, military, and ecclesiastical rulers of Europe were so far from even suspecting, that its vile obscenity pandered only to the incredulity and grossness of taste which, at that period, marked the governing classes throughout Europe, instead of awakening the aristocracy from their dreams of uncontested, perpetual dominion. The ghastly, fiendish, terrific laugh of the dread genius, who uttered the unheeded oracles of a future pregnant with dread revolutions of the existing social order, amused them. Infatuated men! they deemed Gargantua a harmless romance, a tale of giants and magicians. Thus, the nobles of France, in the eighteenth century, fancied "Candide;" a lively, satirical romance; a work breathing the spirit of the age-a restless longing for change-a morbid hatred of all existing institutions-a vague aspiration towards a dark and threatening future-and yet, that book, written by a man, the very embodiment of an unparalleled epoch, the nobles of France, a fated race! thought it a hybrid composition-something between a fairy tale, and an obscene romance! The grass had scarcely grown over the humble tumulus under which had been laid all of the Rector of Meudon that was not genius, wit, humor, and knowledge, when Spain, like a field allowed for years to lie fallow, and which, skilfully cultivated, yields lavishly the harvests of its long dormant fruitfulness, after she had given birth to Gonsalvo, Cortes, Pizarro, and Lope, in a last effort of a still happier fecundity brought forth Michael Cervantes Saavedra! As a young horse, intended for the turf, unconscious of his high blood, wastes, in early contests with ignoble rivals, the vigor of his limbs, alike flexible and strong, the youth threw his hand on several instruments ere he found that which nature and genius had willed that he should strike with unrivalled powers. With Galatea, he loitered in shady groves and flowery meadows. Nay! such the waywardness of genius, Cervantes wrote romances of chivalry. On the stage, too, he strode triumphant, till Lope de Vega's early laurels taught him, as the strains of Byron's lyre taught Scott, in later days, that the artmade poet must give way to the heaven-inspired bard! Cervantes left the arena, not ignobly defeated,-superior to all mortal champions, he only refused to contend with the God of the Lyre! A spectacle of moral sublimity was twice offered to mankind, in the space of three centuries. Two men destined to undying renown, erring at the start in their choice of the road leading to immortality--but both Cervantes and Scott turned back of their own accord, and before having been outstripped in the race, both declined the combat with the rival in whom each had recognized a master spirit-recognized him, by a mystic seal invisible to the crowd, but bright, effulgent, undeniable to the vision of minds of kindred genius. Neither, however, felt discouraged or depressed in his own self-appreciation; each returned to the place whence he had sprung, buoyant with noble aspirations; each looked around with eagle eye, and marked at last his true road to fame; each, bounding in the lists with undiminished vigor, like the god of Homer, in three giant strides, reached the goal. Need we say that the Don Quixote appeared? This was the universal book the book which all who could read, read. As for knight-errantry, it had passed away, like a dream of the morning. It fell at the first blow! In fact, the war against giants and necromancers was but the pretence of Cervantes for taking the field. He pursued his tri-umphant career-no rival there-like the Macedonian youth, he did not lament that he found no more worlds to conquer. His the past, the present,his, too, the endless future! To Lope he had only yielded the poetry of metre-the stage of Madrid! His still the poetry of harmonious prose-his the boundless poetry of nature, the mea-sureless stage where moves the mighty pageant of the world's drama! Cervantes seems to have been under the dominion of two potent spirits, alternately swaying his mind, and modelling its creations to harmonize with their separate and antagonistical nature. One, a bright inhabitant of air, bade him to call forth, from the depth of his imaginings, the noblest of beings; and when, obedient to his command, the Knight of La Mancha stood forth, the deluding elf strewed his path with flowers of loveliest hue, and sweetest perfume; peopled the groves, whose shade he sought, with nymphs and dryads of forms divinely fair; compelled the wind to sigh soft and melodious to his ear; and having persuaded him, that the hearts of statesmen beat responsive to the promptings of self-denying patriotism, that the female breast panted with no other feeling but that of chaste love, sent forth the generous champion of virtue, in a world he believed modelled in the resemblance of the ideal beauty and goodness, the image of which shone lustrous within him, left him there, to be buffeted by all the harsh realities of the existing society. The other spirit, a gnome kneaded out of the grosser element, as to assert his equal sway and mastery over the mind it was given him to rule with equally divided power, commanded the poet to produce, at the same time, and in the same fulness and distinctness of moral individuality, as the subordinate companion of the gallant knight, another being, differing in every feature, in every propensity, in every thought and action, from the one to whom he was doomed to be inseparably united in an eternity of renown. The great enchanter had but to will, and lo! Sancho stood by the side of his valorous master. The one living but in an ideal world, the other without a glimmer of fancy, and with just enough of mind to move about the sluggish embodiment, saw what was gross and inelegant, squalid and absurd; and yet by endowing the Squire with good common-sense, the only quality the Knight had not been gifted with by his Maker, Cervantes rendered Sancho no unworthy companion of the learned, the eloquent, the high-minded lover of Dulcinea. Nay, in their communings, the reader knows not which delights him most, whether the warrior, embracing earth and heaven in his sub lime aspirations, or the matter-of-fact Squire, bringing incessantly his wandering interlocutor back to the realities of things terrestrial. In order to form some idea of the effect of such a book on the generation on which it beamed at once, without a precursor, we need only to recall to our memory, the effect which the second reading of it had on ourselves. We say the second reading, the first is pro fanely allowed to children, at an age who divined that the poor, ill-clad not at the quaint sayings of honest Italy, until Manzoni wrote "The Be- of Anne, when the armies of England |