Scattered over the sections of the Anthology are a number of epigrams touching on this life, which are the more valuable to us, because it is just this side of the ancient world of which the mass of Greek literature affords a very imperfect view. In Homer indeed this is not the case; but in the Athenian period the dramatists and historians give little information, if we accept the highly idealised burlesque of the Aristophanic Comedy. Of the New Comedy too little is preserved to be of much use, and even in it the whole atmosphere was very conventional. The Greek novel did not come into existence till too late; and, when it came, it took the form of romance, concerning itself more with the elaboration of sentiment and the excitement of adventure than with the portraiture of real manners and actual surroundings. For any detailed picture of common life, like that which would be given of our own day to future periods by the domestic novel, we look to ancient literature in vain. Thus, when we are admitted by a fortunate chance into the intimacy of private life, as we are by some of the works of Xenophon and Plutarch or by the letters of the younger Pliny, the charm of the picture is all the greater: and so it is with the epigrams that record birthdays and bridals, the toys of children, the concord of quiet homes. We see the house of the good man,[1] an abiding rest from the labours of a busy life, bountiful to all, masters and servants, who dwell under its shelter, and extending a large hospitality to the friend and the stranger. One generation after another grows up in it under all good and gracious influences; a special providence, under the symbolic forms of Cypris Urania or Artemis the Giver of Light, holds the house in keeping, and each new year brings increased blessing from the gods of the household in recompense of piety and duty.[2] Many dedications bring vividly before us the humbler life of the country cottager, no man's servant or master, happy in the daily labour over his little plot of land, his corn-field and vineyard and coppice; of the fowler with his boys in the woods, the forester and the beekeeper, and the fisherman in his thatched hut on the beach.[3] And in these contrasted pictures the "wealth that makes men kind" seems not to jar with the "poverty that lives with freedom."[4] Modern poetry dwells with more elaboration, but not with the truer or more delicate feeling than those ancient epigrams, on the pretty ways of children, the freshness of school- days, the infinite beauty of the girl as she passes into the woman; or even such slight things as the school-prize for the best copy-book, and the child's doll in the well.[5] A shadow passes over the picture in the complaint of a girl sitting indoors, full of dim thoughts, while the boys go out to their games and enjoy unhindered the colour and movement of the streets.[6] But this is the melancholy of youth, the shadow of the brightness that passes before the maiden's eyes as