ture is
limited, such fashions must necessarily reproduce themselves. Among
other resemblances to later growths of Euphuism, its archaisms on the
one hand, and [99] its neologies on the other, the Euphuism of the
days of Marcus Aurelius had, in the composition of verse, its fancy for
the refrain. It was a snatch from a popular chorus, something he had
heard sounding all over the town of Pisa one April night, one of the
first bland and summer-like nights of the year, that Flavian had chosen
for the refrain of a poem he was then pondering--the Pervigilium
Veneris--the vigil, or "nocturn," of Venus.

Certain elderly counsellors, filling what may be thought a constant
part in the little tragi-comedy which literature and its votaries are
playing in all ages, would ask, suspecting some affectation or
unreality in that minute culture of form:--Cannot those who have a
thing to say, say it directly? Why not be simple and broad, like the
old writers of Greece? And this challenge had at least the effect of
setting his thoughts at work on the intellectual situation as it lay
between the children of the present and those earliest masters.
Certainly, the most wonderful, the unique, point, about the Greek
genius, in literature as in everything else, was the entire absence of
imitation in its productions. How had the burden of precedent, laid
upon every artist, increased since then! It was all around one:--that
smoothly built world of old classical taste, an accomplished fact, with
overwhelming authority on every detail of the conduct of one's [100]
work. With no fardel on its own back, yet so imperious towards those
who came labouring after it, Hellas, in its early freshness, looked as
distant from him even then as it does from ourselves. There might seem
to be no place left for novelty or originality,--place only for a
patient, an infinite, faultlessness. On this question too Flavian
passed through a world of curious art-casuistries, of self-tormenting,
at the threshold of his work. Was poetic beauty a thing ever one and
the same, a type absolute; or, changing always with the soul of time
itself, did it depend upon the taste, the peculiar trick of
apprehension, the fashion, as we say, of each successive age? Might
one recover that old, earlier sense of it, that earlier manner, in a
masterly effort to recall all the complexities of the life, moral and
intellectual, of the earlier age to which it had belonged? Had there
bee