In the exordium of his _Apologie for Poetrie_, Sidney himself lays stress on the priority of the poet in the history of literature. Modern research has found that this rule holds good in the literatures of many more races than Sidney was able to adduce as examples. From free imagination to realism, from mythology to science, from sensuous and passionate rhythms to cold, abstract prose--this is the natural line of progression. And the same course of development is repeated in the evolution of the various literary species. The first Hellenic {viii} philosophers wrote in hexameters; history began with epos, and went through the semi-poetic phase of Herodotus before it emerged in the form of abstract prose and the generalising method of science with Thucydides. Scientific and technical literature had its birth in poetry and mythology; and even when it became practical and experimental maintained for a while the fashions of poetry, and sought the inspiration of the muse. In the same way, the novel, whose evolution seems to have culminated in unpoetic days, must have its origins sought in far-off times when authors wrote instinctively in metre. Narrative or dramatic poetry and the novel must always of course be very nearly related together. A poem and a novel, it might be said, are but two different sorts of fiction. But to make this statement literally true, the word fiction would have to be interpreted in two different senses. For the difference between poetry and prose is not simply one of style, but lies in the circumstance that the imagination of the poet, inspired with emotion and ideality, appeals directly to imagination, whilst prose addresses the understanding. The poet merely asks us to imagine; but the prose-writer has to reason and convince. Writers of such prose fiction as the Elizabethan novels, and the Greek and Latin novels that arose in the decadence of classical literature, did not realise that the mind of the reader is reached in essentially different ways by prose and poetry; that in the one case the imagination is working on a higher plane, and responding to another kind of stimulus. Both accordingly produced something that was really neither prose nor poetry, and both had slight influence on the subsequent development of the novel. It will be worth while a little later to compare the Elizabethan novel with this curious product of an earlier age of culture and decadence. For the novel of Sidney, Lyly, Lodge, and Greene, though it belongs to the Elizabethan era in time, was not a native growth of that age of great beginnings, but rather a final and unproductive efflorescence of the romantic literature that had its roots in times already ancient. Sidney the critic and interpreter of letters looked back, not forward. He did not discern the signs around him of the tremendous birth that was commencing, but would have been proud to be compared with {ix} Heliodorus and Longus,