Melpomene in admiring the opera, found nothing in the novel which she
could own and bless. Fleeting passages, remote and slight fragments,
were pleasing to them all, like the oases of a Sahara, or the sites of
high civilization on the earth; but the whole world of novels seemed to
them a chaos undisciplined by art and unformed to beauty. The gates of
the halls where the classics live in immortal youth were beginning to
close against the voluminous prose romances that have sprung from modern
thought, when the deliberations of the Muses were suddenly interrupted.
They had disturbed the divine elements of modern society. Forth from all
the recesses of the air came troops of Gothic elves, trolls, fairies,
sprites, and all the other romantic beings which had inspired the modern
mind to novel-writing,--marching or gambolling, pride in their port,
defiance in their eye, mischief in their purpose,--and began so vigorous
an attack upon their classic visitors and critics, that the latter were
glad to betake themselves to the mighty-winged Pegasus, who rapidly bore
them in retreat to the present home of the _Dii Majores_, that point of
the empyrean directly above Olympus.

And well, indeed, might the Muses wonder at the rise of the novel and
its vast developments, for the classic literature presents no similar
works. One of Plato's dialogues or Aesop's fables is as near an approach
to a prose romance as antiquity in its golden eras can offer. The few
productions of the kind which appeared during the decline of literature
in the early Christian centuries, as the "Golden Ass" of Apuleius and
the "Æthiopica" of Heliodorus, were freaks of Nature, an odd growth
rather than a distinct species, and are also to be contrasted rather
than compared with the later novel. Such as they are, moreover, they
were produced under Christian as much as classic influences. The
æsthetic Hellenes admitted into their literature nothing so composite,
so likely to be crude, as the romance. Their styles of art were all