"It is chiefly in the fictions of an age," says Dunlop, "that we can discover the modes of living, dress, and manners of the period;" and he goes on to say--"But even if the utility which is derived from Fiction were less than it is, how much are we indebted to it for pleasure and enjoyment! It sweetens solitude and charms sorrow--it occupies the attention of the vacant, and unbends the mind of the philosopher. Like the enchanter, Fiction shows us, as it were in a mirror, the most agreeable objects; recalls from a distance the forms which are dear to us, and soothes our own grief by awakening our sympathy for others. By its means the recluse is placed in the midst of society; and he who is harassed and agitated in the city is transported to rural tranquillity and repose. The rude are refined by an introduction, as it were, to the higher orders of mankind, and even the dissipated and selfish are, in some degree, corrected by those paintings of virtue and simple nature, which must ever be employed by the novelist, if he wish to awaken emotion or delight." Huet, Bishop of Avranches, was the first who wrote a regular and systematic treatise on the origin of fictitious narrative--"De origine Fabularum Romanensium." He gives it as his opinion, that "not in Provence (Provincia Romanorum), nor yet in Spain, are we to look for the fatherland of those amusing compositions called Romances; but that it is among the people of the East, the Arabs, the Egyptians, the Persians, and the Syrians, that the germ and origin is to be found, of this species of fictitious narrative, for which the peculiar genius and poetical temperament of those nations particularly adapt them, and in which they delight to a degree scarcely to be credited; for even their ordinary discourse is interspersed with figurative expressions, and their maxims of theology and philosophy, and above all of morals and political science, are invariably couched under the guise of allegory or parable." In confirmation of this opinion he remarks, that "nearly all those who in early times distinguished themselves as writers of what are now called _Romances_, were of Oriental birth or extraction;"--and he instances "Clearchus, a pupil of Aristotle, who was a native of Soli, in Cilicia,--Iamblicus, a Syrian--Heliodorus and Lucian, natives, the one of Emessa, the other of Samosata--Achilles Tatius, of Alexandria." This statement of Huet's is admitted to hold good, _generally_, by the author of a very interesting Article on the "_Early Greek Romances_," in No. CCCXXXIII. of Blackwood's Magazine; who however differs from the learned Bishop in some particulars.