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,[51] 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 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. [Footnote 51: 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 personæ_--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.]