not, doubtless, fill a very large ossuary; but a necropolis could be constructed from lost manuscripts. It is not probable that, of the French literature of the Middle Ages, much more than the hundredth part has survived the changing fashion. Almost all the dramatic works have disappeared. The number of authors must have been immense at a time when the writer was his own publisher, the poet his own reciter, the dramatist his own actor. In a certain sense printing proved an obstacle to letters. It operated a selection and cast contempt upon books that had failed to find a publisher. This situation still exists, though mitigated by the low cost of mechanical typography. The invention with which we are now threatened--a home-printing-press--would triple or quadruple the number of new books, and we should have mediaeval conditions once more. Everyone with a smattering of culture--and some others, as is the case to-day--would venture the little work which the writer confides to his friends before offering it to the public. Every progress ends by defeating its own purpose. Reaching its maximum development, it tends to re-establish the primitive state which it had superseded. The change in civilization, from antiquity to the Middle Ages, was intellectual and sentimental rather than material. The same trades continued under the same primitive conditions. The bookshop in the time of Rutebeuf was the same that sold the _Odes_ of Horace, when they were fresh and full of life. In both periods, which were similarly periods of expansion, literature was similarly abundant. There remains almost nothing of it to-day. All Latin poetry, from Ennius to Sidonius Apollinaris, is contained in two folio volumes,[7] but almost the whole second volume is devoted to the Christian poets. The Greeks have been less badly treated. Antony made a gift to Cleopatra of the library at Pergamos, which contained two hundred thousand Greek works, each in a single copy. Greek literature, in Didot's edition, is contained in sixty-one volumes. If we add an occasional treatise of Aristotle, Herondas, Bacchylides, the number of pages will not be greatly increased. Literature fared the same as an army which has been decimated. The dead are buried and the survivors become heroes. We may judge of the relative, but not of the absolute value of what is left. Here we encounter Pratinas once more. He teaches us that glory is a fact. III