But _Hysminias and Hysmine_[185] has interests of character which distinguish its author and itself, not merely from the herd of chroniclers and commentators who make up the bulk of Byzantine literature so-called, but even from such more respectable but somewhat featureless work as Anna Comnena's. It is not a good book; but it is by no means so extremely bad as the traditional judgment (not always, perhaps, based on or buttressed by direct acquaintance with the original) is wont to give out. On one at least of the sides of this interest it is quite useless to read it except in the original, for the attraction is one of style. Neither Lyly nor any of our late nineteenth-century "stylists" has outgone, perhaps none has touched, Eustathius in euphuism. It is needless to say that while the simplicity of the best Greek style usually prefers the most direct and natural order, its suppleness lends itself to almost any gymnastic, and its lucidity prevents total confusion from arising. Eustathius has availed himself of these opportunities for "raising his mother tongue to a higher power" to the very utmost. No translation can do justice to the elaborate foppery of even the first sentence,[186] with its coquetry of arrangement, its tormented structure of phrase, its jingle of sound-repetition, its desperate rejection of simplicity in every shape and form. To describe precisely the means resorted to would take a chapter at least. They are astonishingly modern--the present tense, the use of catchwords like [Greek: holos], the repetitions and jingles above referred to. Excessively elaborate description of word-painting, though modern too, can hardly be said to be a novelty: it had distinguished most of the earlier Greek novelists, especially Achilles Tatius. But there is something in the descriptions of _Hysminias and Hysmine_ more mediaeval than those of Achilles, more like the _Romance of the Rose_, to which, indeed, there is a curious resemblance of atmosphere in the book. Triplets of epithet--"a man athirst, and parched, and boiling"--meet us. There is a frequent economy of conjunctions. There is the resort to personification--for instance, in the battle of Love and Shame, which serves as climax to the elaborate description of the lovers' kissing. In short, all our old friends--the devices which every generation of seekers after style parades with such a touching conviction that they are quite new, and which every literary student knows to be as old as literature--are to be found here. The language is in its decadence: the writer has not much to say. But it is surprising how much, with all his drawbacks, he accomplishes. [Footnote 185: Sometimes spelt _Ismenias and Ismene_. I believe it was first published in an Italian translation of the late Renaissance, and it has appeared in other languages since. But it is only worth reading in its own.]