Of the social life of the people in these prehistoric times we know practically nothing. Only one inference, possibly precarious enough, may be made from one of the features of the architecture of Knossos. There is no attempt to seclude the life of the palace from that of the town and country around it. On the contrary, the building seems almost to have been arranged with the view of affording the citizens of the Minoan Empire every facility for intercourse with the royal household. The great West Court, with its portico and its seats along the palace wall, suggests considerable freedom of access for the populace to the immediate neighbourhood of royalty. It is perhaps rather a large inference to conclude that 'the very architecture of the Palaces of Knossos and Phaestos may testify to the power of the democracy';[*] but at least the thoughtfulness with which the comfort of the people visiting the palace was provided for, and the general openness and lack of any jealous seclusion, testified to by the whole style of the buildings, suggest that the relations between the Kings of the House of Minos and their subjects were much more human and pleasant than those obtaining in most ancient kingdoms. [Footnote *: Mosso, 'The Palaces of Crete,' p. 163.] From their art one would, on the whole, conclude the people to have been a somewhat attractive race, frankly enjoying the more pleasant aspects of life, and capable of a keen delight in all the beauties of Nature. Minoan art has little that is sombre about it; it is redolent of the open air and the free ocean, and a people who so rejoiced in natural beauty and delighted to surround themselves with their own reproductions and interpretations of it can scarcely have been bowed beneath a heavy yoke of servitude, or have lived other than a comparatively free and independent life. How much the Greeks of the Classic period imbibed of the spirit of this gifted and artistic race we can only imagine. The artistic standpoint of the Hellenic Greek is somewhat different from that of his Minoan or Mycenaean forerunner, and he has lost that keen feeling for Nature which is so conspicuous in the work of the earlier stock; but the two races are at least at one in that profound love of beauty which is the dominant characteristic of the Greek nature, and it may well be that something of that feeling formed part of the heritage which the conqueror took over from the conquered, and which, added to the virility and intellectual power of the northern race, made the historic Greek the most brilliant type of humanity that the world has ever seen. CHAPTER XI LETTERS AND RELIGION