[18] An exception may be made for the genuine letters of which we have found the actual originals among the papyri of Egypt. Here we find, among Greeks scattered abroad, the offspring of adventurous and mercenary soldiers, all the urbanities of modern letter writing. All the Roman formulæ of politeness we find in Cicero’s letters, were derived from this source—the long current Greek forms of correspondence.
[19] If Shakspeare’s Romeo and Juliet ends not in happiness, but in disaster, the devices of the play—the sleeping drug, the hiding in the tomb where the lovers again unite, these are the stock devices of our Greek novels, so clearly, that the story must have been derived through Italian versions from a Greek novel of this kind. Boccaccio was clearly influenced by this literature.
[20] The first beginnings of music, in the form of whistles or pipes, are found among prehistoric remains of people who had never learned to write, but only to draw pictures.
[21] In the rudest cases the house was not excavated but was built on the surface, and then covered with a mound of earth.
[22] The inner lintel stone 30 feet long, 16 deep, and over 3 thick, weighs about 112 tons. The dromos is 115 long and 19 wide. The doorway is 17½ feet high and 8 feet wide at the top swelling to 8½ at the ground. The whole chamber about 50 feet high and 50 across the floor. Read description in Baedeker, p. 324.
[23] The beehive chamber I take to be an importation from northern and central Europe and therefore probably due to that strain in early Greek civilisation.
[24] Villari’s Studies, p. 258.
[25] God—says Herodotus in the famous dialogue of Xerxes and Artabanus on the fugitive character of human happiness—God, that has given to man a sweet taste of life, is found grudging in his dole.
[26] Nothing is more striking in the old churches of such towns as Lüneburg, Wismar, Rostock, than the representation of the Crucifixion on the carved wooden work used as the reredos in various chapels as well as over the high altar. The main figures are in high relief, the crowd standing in front of them in the clear, all coloured richly and in many colours as well as gilding. But for the painful subject, these triumphs of the carver are perhaps the most splendid in mediæval art. The magnificent tombs of the Dukes of Burgundy at Dijon are their worthy rivals in stone.
[27] The foaming heads of the horses of the rising sun at the left corner of the east pediment of the Parthenon are a splendid exception to this calm in the angles of the pediment, and the subdued calmness of the horses of Selene, which represent her setting, accentuates this exception.