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At one time, that which was sentimental was the foremost in favor, and that poet was called the greatest who best knew how to touch this string; then it passed over to the peppered style of writing, and nothing pleased but histories of knights and robbers. Now people find pleasure in prosaic life, and Schröder and Iffland are the acknowledged idols.
We have first the stage of culture represented by the Japanese, the Finns, the Mexicans, and the Peruvians, with fairly well-developed gods, who have emotions and histories. In this group Japan takes the lowest place; it is chiefly in the figures regarded as deified men that definiteness of character and human warmth are found.
I intend, my friends, according as God shall help me, to preach to you, between this time and Christmas, a few sermons on some of the saints and worthies of the Old Testament; and I will begin this day with Noah. Now you must bear in mind that the histories of these ancient men were, as St. Paul says, written for our example.
And after having seen all this, what can be more charming than to see how a bevy of damsels comes forth from the gate of the castle in gay and gorgeous attire, such that, were I to set myself now to depict it as the histories describe it to us, I should never have done; and then how she who seems to be the first among them all takes the bold knight who plunged into the boiling lake by the hand, and without addressing a word to him leads him into the rich palace or castle, and strips him as naked as when his mother bore him, and bathes him in lukewarm water, and anoints him all over with sweet-smelling unguents, and clothes him in a shirt of the softest sendal, all scented and perfumed, while another damsel comes and throws over his shoulders a mantle which is said to be worth at the very least a city, and even more?
Though Livy is the single great historian of the Augustan age, there was throughout this period a profuse production of memoirs and commentaries, as well as of regular histories. Augustus wrote thirteen books of memoirs of his own life down to the pacification of the Empire at the close of the Cantabrian war.
They stand before me on the shelf as I write, and in them are many histories of shame, sorrow, and evil, of faith deluded and innocence betrayed, of the cruelty of priests, of avarice triumphant over love, and of love triumphant over death enough, indeed, to furnish half a hundred of true romances.
A few quotations from standard and ecclesiastical histories will show this important epoch in the rise of the Papacy that plunged the world into almost universal apostasy. "The living church retiring gradually within the lonely sanctuary of a few solitary hearts, an external church was substituted in its place, and all its forms were declared to be of divine appointment.
People talk of troubles, of romances, of sad stories and painful histories before me, but no one ever guessed that I have known perhaps the saddest of all. My heart learned to ache as the first lesson it learned in life. When I think of those unhappy children who go about the world with so dark a secret locked in their hearts, I think of myself, and what I hold locked in my heart.
It is the merit of Taine to have asserted, with reference to English literature, that literary evolution depends, not on literary events, but on facts of a general character. The general history of individual facts was developed before the special histories.
As they loved to draw the lower forms of nature up to them, divining their histories, and imitating their ways, in their wild dances and paintings; even so did they love to look upward and people the atmosphere that enfolds the earth, with fairies and manitoes. The sister, obliged to leave her brother on the earth, bids him look up at evening, and he will see her painting her face in the west.
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