"Ere yet my shame, wide-circling through the town, * With deans deceased, to sleep beneath the stone." He lengthen'd out with plaints the livelong night, At that still hour of night, when dreams are oft'nest true, As in some lake, when hush'd in every breeze, 66 Sleep, Henry, sleep, my best beloved," he said, "Soft dreams of bliss shall soothe thy midnight hour; Fly fast, ye months, till Henry shall receive E'en now methinks the awe-struck crowd behold And love and hope once more his curtains drew. * Dead deans, broken bottles, dilapidated lantherns, under-graduated ladders, and other lumber, have generally found their level under the pavement of Brazenose cloisters. † Like Virgil's nightingale or owl "Ferali carmine bubo Flet noctem." "Post mediam visus noctem cum somnia vera." § We have heard it whispered, but cannot undertake to vouch for the truth of the rumour, that a considerable wager now depends upon the accomplishment of this prophecy within nine calendar months after the Doctor has obtained a bona fide degree. || Alluding to the collegiate punishment before explained. CHARLES EDWARD AT VERSAILLES. ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF CULLODEN. TAKE away that star and garter-hide them from my loathing sight, And the gusty winds that shiver 'neath the tapestry on the wall. Ah my God! where am I now? Will that baleful vision never vanish from my aching sight? Must those scenes and sounds of terror haunt me still by day and night? Yea, the earth hath no oblivion for the noblest chance it gave, None, save in its latest refuge-seek it only in the grave. Love may die, and hatred slumber, and their memory will decay, But the dream of power once broken, what shall give repose again? Oh, these years of bitter anguish !-What is life to such as me, Oh the brave-the brave and noble-who have died in vain for me! EARLY GREEK ROMANCES-THE ETHIOPICS OF HELIODORUS. "It is not in Provence, (Provincia Romanorum,) as is commonly said from the derivation of the name-nor yet in Spain, as many suppose, that we are to look for the fatherland of those amusing compositions called Romances, which are so eminently useful in these days as affording a resource and occupation to ladies and gentlemen who have nothing to do. It is in distant and far different climes to our own, and in the remote antiquity of long vanished ages:-it is among the people of the East, the Arabs, the Egyptians, the Persians, and the Syrians, that the germ and origin is to be found of this species of fictitious narrative, for which the peculiar genius and poetical temperament of those nations particularly adapt them, and in which they delight to a degree scarcely to be credited. For even their ordinary discourse is interspersed with figurative expressions; and their maxims of theology and philosophy, and above all, of morals and political science, are invariably couched under the guise of allegory or parable. I need not stay to enlarge upon the universal veneration paid throughout the East to the fables of Bidpai or Pilpay, and to Lokman, who is (as may easily be shown) the Esop of the Greeks:-and it is well known that the story of Isfendiyar, and of the daring deeds of the Persian hero Rustan, in love and war,* are to this day more popular in those regions than the tales of Hercules, Roland, or Amadis de Gaul, ever were with And so decidedly is Asia the parent of these fictions, that we shall us. 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." 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,† 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 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 paadia 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 ancedote of the effect produced among his escort by one of these popular chants. The prototype of the well-known Welsh legend of Beth-Gelert, for instance, is found in the Sanscrit Hitopadosa, as translated by Sir William Jones, with a mere change in the dramatis persona-the faithful hound Gelert becoming a tame mungoos or ichneumon, the wolf a cabra-capello, and the young heir of the Welsh prince an infant rajah. 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 Minor, Syria, and Egypt, and consequently, in all probability, Greeks by descent; and though the scene of their works is frequently laid in Asia, the costumes and characters introduced are almost invariably on the Greek model. These writers, therefore, may fairly be considered as constituting a distinct class from those more strictly Oriental, not only in birth, but in language and ideas; and as being, in fact, the legitimate forerunners of that portentous crowd of modern novelists, whose myriad productions seem destined (as the Persians believe of the misshapen progeny of Gog and Magog, confined within the brazen wall of Iskender,) to over-run the world of literature in these latter days. At the head of this early school of romantic writers, in point of merit as of time, (for the writings of Lucian can scarcely be considered as regular romances; and the "Babylonica" of Jamblichus, and the "Dinias and Dercyllis" of Antonius Diogenes, are known to us only by the abstract of them preserved in Photius,) we may, without hesitation, place Heliodorus, the author of the "Ethiopics," "whose writings" says Huetius-" the subsequent novelists of those ages constantly proposed to themselves as a model for imitation; and as truly may they all be said to have drunk of the waters of this fountain, as all the poets did of the Homeric spring." To so servile an extent, indeed, was this imitation carried, that while both the incidents and characters in the "Clitophon and Leucippe" of Achilles Tatius, a work which, in point of literary merit, stands next to that of Heliodorus, are, in many passages, almost a reproduction, with different names and localities,* of those in the "Ethiopics," the last-named has again had his copyists in the "Hysminias and Hysmine" of Eustathius or Eumathius, and the "Dosicles and Rhodanthe" of Theodorus Prodromus, the latter of whom was a monk of the twelfth century. In these productions of the lower empire, the extravagance of the language, the improbability of the plot, and the wearisome dullness of the details, are worthy of each other; and are only varied occasionally by a little gross indelicacy, from which, indeed, none but Heliodorus is wholly exempt. Yet, "as in the lowest deep there is a lower still," so even Theodorus Prodromus has found an humble imitator in Nicetas Eugenianus, than whose romance of "Charicles and Drosilla" it must be allowed that the force of nonsense "can no further go.' Besides this descending scale of plagiarism, which we have followed down to its lowest anti-climax, we should mention, for the sake of making our catalogue 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 à 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 The principal adventures of Clitophon and Leucippe consist in being twice taken by pirates on the banks of the Nile, as Theagenas and Chariclea are in the Ethiopics. |