hink they
do. Hysminias is rather a silly, and more than rather a
chicken-hearted, fellow; his conduct on board ship when his beloved
incurs the fate of Jonah is eminently despicable: but then he was
countryman _ex hypothesi_ of Mourzoufle, not of Villehardouin. The
"battailous" spirit of the West is not to be expected in a Byzantine
sophist. Whether something of its artistic and literary spirit is not
to be detected in him is a more doubtful question. For my part, I
cannot read of Hysmine without being reminded of Nicolette, as I am
never reminded in other parts of the _Scriptores Erotici_.

[Sidenote: _Its "decadence."_]

Yet, experiment or remainder, imitation or original, one cannot but
feel that the book, like all the literature to which it belongs, has
more of the marks of death than of life in it. Its very elegances are
"rose-coloured curtains for the doctors"--the masque of a moribund
art. Some of them may have been borrowed by, rather than from, younger
and hopefuller craftsmanship, but the general effect is the same. We
are here face to face with those phenomena of "decadence," which,
though they have often been exaggerated and wrongly interpreted, yet
surely exist and reappear at intervals--the contortions of style that
cannot afford to be natural, the tricks of word borrowed from literary
reminiscence ([Greek: holos] itself in this way is at least as old as
Lucian), the tormented effort at detail of description, at "analysis"
of thought and feeling, of incident and moral. The cant phrase about
being "_ne trop tard dans un monde trop vieux_" has been true of many
persons, while more still have affected to believe it true of
themselves, since Eustathius: it is not much truer of any one than of
him.

Curious as such specimens of a dying literature may be, it cannot but
be refreshing to go westward from it to the nascent literatures of
Italy and of Spain, literatures which have a future instead of merely
a past, and which, independently of that somewhat illegitimate
advantage, have characteristics not unable to bear comparison with
those of the past, even had it existed.

[Sidenote: _Lateness of Italian._]

Between the earliest Italian and the earliest Spanish literature,
however, there are striking differences to be noted. Persons ignorant
of the usual course of literary history might expect in Italian a
regular and unbroken development, literary as well as linguistic, of
Latin. But, as a matter of fact,