But they possessed more than taste and judgement. They had inventiveness. We may reflect for a moment upon the various forms and modes of literature which we possess and practise in verse and prose. Of verse there are the epic, lyric, elegiac, satiric, dramatic, didactic, pastoral, epigrammatic, philosophic varieties. In prose there are history, oratory, philosophy, biography, criticism, fiction. To us all these forms and species, with their appropriate language, metre and tone, are taken for granted, as if they were the necessary outcome of some natural order of things. They are, no doubt, founded in nature. Nevertheless, we should remember that they must have had a beginning of their differentiation, that they must have been invented somewhere. And we discover that each of them is to be found arising in recognizable shape on the soil of ancient Greece. It is easy nowadays for us to imitate existing forms, to build with the architecture of the drama of Shakespeare and the epic of Milton, to copy the lyrical metres of Gray, Shelley, and Tennyson, to adopt the satirical machinery of Pope and Dryden. But these differentiations in mode of expression represent something deeper, some distinction evolved by the human mind between compositions of one purpose and compositions of another. It was the Greeks who first convincingly and systematically illustrated that distinction, and who found for each subject of thought its appropriate vehicle of expression. More modern times have evolved many modifications of detail in metre or rhyme, and have essayed many novelties in the way of narrative. But they have never added an entirely new form of poetry or prose to the _répertoire_ of the Greeks. Tennyson does not write _In Memoriam_ in the metre and language of _Paradise Lost_. Shelley’s _Ode to a Skylark_ does not employ the diction and rhythm of Pope’s _Essay on Man_. It is recognized that the feeling and its vehicle would be incongruous. But how does this come to be recognized? A world is quite conceivable in which there might have been developed but one form of literature and one ideal of expression. In such a world the incongruity would not be felt. The early Hellenes made their own literary beginnings upon almost a clear field, and it is one of their imperishable glories that they succeeded in realizing the subtle relations between language and thought or feeling, and in expressing these latter in all the variety of extant literary forms. For heroic deeds and lofty incident they developed the epic verse; for the sweets and bitters of love, and for other passions and ardours, they built the lyric stanza; for the plaints of mourning they created the elegiac; they did this gradually, no doubt, and in the main unconsciously, but with all the more perfect result. If we inherit what Greece has created, we have no right to assume that all our happy varieties of literary form are things of course, which would somehow have come to any nation.