Here, as elsewhere, the power of "fashion," as it is called, is but one minor form, slight enough, it may be, yet distinctly symptomatic, of that deeper yearning of human nature towards ideal perfection, which is a continuous force in it; and since in this direction too human nature 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.