to the jewellers who were employed to complete the unfinished
window of the palace of Aladdin. Whatever skill or cost could do
was done. Palace and bazaar were ransacked for precious stones.
Yet the artists, with all their dexterity, with all their
assiduity, and with all their vast means, were unable to produce
anything comparable to the wonders which a spirit of a higher
order had wrought in a single night.

The history of every literature with which we are acquainted
confirms, we think, the principles which we have laid down. In
Greece we see the imaginative school of poetry gradually fading
into the critical. Aeschylus and Pindar were succeeded by
Sophocles, Sophocles by Euripides, Euripides by the Alexandrian
versifiers. Of these last, Theocritus alone has left
compositions which deserve to be read. The splendour and
grotesque fairyland of the Old Comedy, rich with such gorgeous
hues, peopled with such fantastic shapes, and vocal alternately
with the sweetest peals of music and the loudest bursts of elvish
laughter, disappeared forever. The master-pieces of the New
Comedy are known to us by Latin translations of extraordinary
merit. From these translations, and from the expressions of the
ancient critics, it is clear that the original compositions were
distinguished by grace and sweetness, that they sparkled with
wit, and abounded with pleasing sentiment; but that the creative
power was gone. Julius Caesar called Terence a half Menander,--a
sure proof that Menander was not a quarter Aristophanes.

The literature of the Romans was merely a continuation of the
literature of the Greeks. The pupils started from the point at
which their masters had, in the course of many generations