"While fully admitting," he says, "that it is to the vivid fancy and picturesque imagination of the Orientals that we owe the origin of all those popular legends, which have penetrated under various changes of costume, into every corner of Europe, we still hold, that the invention of the Romance of ordinary life, on which the interest of the story depends upon occurrences in some measure within the bounds of probability, and in which the heroes and heroines are neither invested with superhuman qualities, nor extricated from their difficulties by supernatural means, must be ascribed to a more _European_ state of society than that which produced those tales of wonder, which are commonly considered as characteristic of the climes of the East." This difference of opinion he fortifies, by remarking that "the authors enumerated by the Bishop of Avranches himself were all denizens of Greek cities of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, and consequently, in all probability, _Greeks_ by descent; and though the scene of their works is frequently laid in Asia, the costumes and characters introduced are almost invariably on the Greek model." He concludes this part of his subject by saying; "these writers, therefore, may fairly be considered as constituting a distinct class from those more strictly Oriental--not only in birth but in language and ideas; and as being in fact the legitimate forerunners of modern novelists." The first to imbibe a love for fictitious narrative from the Eastern people among whom they dwelt, were the Milesians, a colony of Greeks, and from them this species of narrative derived the name of "Sermo Milesius."[1] A specimen of the Milesian tale may be seen in the Stories of _Parthenius_, which are chiefly of the amatory kind, and not over remarkable for their moral tendency. From the Greek inhabitants of Asia Minor, especially from the Milesians, it was natural that a fondness for _Fiction_ should extend itself into Greece, and that pleasure should produce imitation. But it was not until the conquests of Alexander, that a greater intercourse between Greece and Asia became the means of conveying the stores of fiction from the one continent to the other. The Romance writers, who flourished previous to Heliodorus, are known only from the summary of their compositions preserved to us by Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, in the ninth century. We subjoin their names and the titles of their works:-- Antonius Diogenes wrote "The incredible things in Thule;" Iamblicus, the "Babylonica," comprising the formidable number of sixteen books; in addition to which there is the "Ass" of Lucian, founded chiefly upon the "Metamorphoses of Lucius."