But I cannot conclude without a word about the prose novel of the Greeks, who here also founded a form of literature that has assumed gigantic importance in the modern world. The novel may be regarded as the last legitimate offering, a child born out of due time, as Saint Paul calls himself, but like Saint Paul a greater influence in our modern life than any of his older brethren. It might have been thought that from the modern Comedy of Menander and his rivals to a prose novel in the modern sense was but a small and inevitable step, and yet no branch of Greek literature had less influence upon the rise and development of so kindred a subject. The very frame on which all Menander’s plays were stretched with wearisome iteration, I mean the rehabilitation of a respectable girl, who solely through the neglect or the violence of others, has become a mother without being a wife--such a topic would be wholly repugnant to any Greek novelist we know. For in all the stories we possess the main interest turns upon the preservation of the heroine’s purity through every sort of temptation, and every sort of attempted violence. This was a topic quite strange to Greek sentiment and foreign to Greek literature till it was imported from the East by those who had there learned that sort of love-story. There are indications of it in the romantic episodes of Xenophon’s _Cyrus_, but the adoption of it as a striking topic is later, and due to Callimachus, whose poem called _Acontius and Cydippe_ was perhaps the first love-story of our modern type offered to the Greek world. A youth and a maiden, whose beauties were described in great detail, meet at a religious ceremony, and fall deeply in love at first sight. The various and commonplace obstacles to their union which are familiar in every modern society--worldly parents, a richer suitor for the maiden, threats of broken hearts and of suicide--these occupy the story, which through many untoward delays ends in a happy marriage.[19] It may cause amazement in this audience that such a plot should ever have been new in literature, especially in that of the Greeks, who had every sort of human experience before them. Yet it was new in the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, and made its fortune in that world-weary and artificial society. In all the Greek novels we possess, some such love-story is the necessary thread which glitters through the tissue, so much so that the German pedants edit them under the title _Scriptores Erotici Graeci_. Yet the relation between the lovers being absolutely pure, any temptations which occur arise from the passions of violent people who create no interest in the reader. By far the best specimen we have, owing to its simplicity and its natural scenery, is the famous _Daphnis and Chloe_, which has found so many imitators ever since the French of Amyot has made it accessible to modern Europe. We feel indeed that the unknown author was far from possessing the innocence of his characters,