In the attempt to retrace the Nile of Romance to a solitary source, in the eagerness of their discoveries they had not yet ascertained that this Nile bears many far-divided heads, and some from which Time shall never remove its clouds; for who dares assign an origin to the ancient Milesian tales, the tales and their origin being alike lost?[2] Warton, encumbered by his theory of an Eastern origin, opened the map to track the voyage of an Arabian tale: he landed it at Marseilles, that port by which ancient Greece first held its intercourse with our Europe, and thence the tale was sent forwards through genial Italy, but forced to harbour in this voyage of Romance at the distant shores of Brittany, that land of Romance and of the ancient Briton. The result of his system startled the literary world by his assumption, that "the British history" of Geoffry of Monmouth entirely consists of Arabian inventions! the real source of the airy existence of our British Arthur! Bishop Percy had been nearly as adventurous in his Gothic origin, by landing a number of the northern bards with the army of Rollo in Normandy; an event which contributed to infuse the Scaldic genius into the romances of chivalry, whose national hero is Charlemagne--the tutelary genius of France and Germany. They had looked to the east, and to the north--and wherever they looked for the origin of Romance it was found. They had sought in a corner of the universe for that which is universal. ROMANCE sprang to birth in every clime, native wherever she is found, notwithstanding that she has been a wanderer among all lands, and as prodigal a dispenser as she has been free in her borrowings and artful in her concealments. The art of fabling may be classed among the mimetic arts--it is an aptitude of the universal and plastic faculties of our nature; and man might not be ill defined and charactered as "a mimetic and fabling animal."