[95] _Vide_ H. N. Coleridge ("Greek Classic Poets," p. 38-42), in speaking of the "Dionysiacs, the Thebaids, the Epigoniads, Naupactica, genealogies, and the other works of that sort," p. 44, he adds--"Just as in the Indian and Persian epics, in the Northern Eddas, in the poem of the 'Cid,' in the early chronicles of every nation with which we are acquainted, one story follows another story in the order of mere history; and the skill and fire of the poet are shown, not in the artifice of grouping a hundred figures into one picture, but in raising admiration by the separate beauty of each successive picture. _They tell the tale as the tale had been told to them, and leave out nothing._" [96] According to the account which the Chinese themselves give of their annals, the works of Confucius were proscribed, after his death, by the Emperor Chi-Hoangti, and all the copies, including the Chu-King, were recovered from the dictation of an old man who had retained them in memory. "The great moralist of the East" himself, Confucius, asserted--"that he only wrought on materials already existing." _Vide_ Klaproth ap., Cardinal Wiseman, "Science and Rev. Religion," ii. p. 49. In the article in the _Cornhill Magazine_, Nov. 1871, containing the valuable collection of Dravidian (South Indian) folk-songs, it is said, p. 577, that "they are handed down from generation to generation, entirely vivâ voce, and from the minstrels have passed into public use." And this seems to me the sufficient reply to Sir Charles Lyell's somewhat captious objection, that if the intellectual knowledge of the primitive age was so great, we ought now to be digging up steam engines instead of flint implements. Every age has its own peculiar superiority, as hath each individual mind--_non omnia possumus omnes_--and it is as reasonable to object to an age of philosophic thought, or of intuitive perception, that it was not rich in the wealth of material civilisation, as it would be to object to Plato or Shakspeare, that they did not acquire dominion over mankind; or to Alexander, that he did not excel Aristotle; or to Sir C. Lyell, supposing geology to be certain, that he did not anticipate Darwin, supposing Darwinism to be true. And if it should be more precisely objected that, if in those ages there was the knowledge of writing for monumental purposes, we ought at least to find monuments,[97] I say that the _onus probandi_ lies with the objector to prove the invention or introduction of writing in the interval between the age of Homer and the age of Pericles, as against us who believe in its primeval transmission; or to show that its introduction was more probable at this latter period than at the former.[98]