Among other resemblances to later growths of Euphuism, its archaisms
on the one hand, and [99] its neologies on the other, the Euphuism
of the days of Marcus Aurelius had, in the composition of verse, its
fancy for the refrain. It was a snatch from a popular chorus,
something he had heard sounding all over the town of Pisa one April
night, one of the first bland and summer-like nights of the year,
that Flavian had chosen for the refrain of a poem he was then
pondering--the Pervigilium Veneris--the vigil, or "nocturn," of
Venus.

Certain elderly counsellors, filling what may be thought a constant
part in the little tragi-comedy which literature and its votaries are
playing in all ages, would ask, suspecting some affectation or
unreality in that minute culture of form:--Cannot those who have a
thing to say, say it directly? Why not be simple and broad, like the
old writers of Greece? And this challenge had at least the effect of
setting his thoughts at work on the intellectual situation as it lay
between the children of the present and those earliest masters.
Certainly, the most wonderful, the unique, point, about the Greek
genius, in literature as in everything else, was the entire absence
of imitation in its productions. How had the burden of precedent,
laid upon every artist, increased since then! It was all around
one:--that smoothly built world of old classical taste, an
accomplished fact, with overwhelming authority on every detail of the
conduct of one's [100] work. With no fardel on its own back, yet so
imperious towards those who came labouring after it, Hellas, in its
early freshness, looked as distant from him even then as it does from
ourselves. There might seem to be no place left for novelty or
originality,--place only for a patient, an infinite, faultlessness.
On this question too Flavian passed through a world of curious art-