or elaborately written out on the papyrus. At the same time as men were inventing and elaborating myths they were also accumulating records. As families grew into tribes, and as tribes contended for the best pastures and the best fishing, there were countless opportunities for individual prowess and courageous achievement, and the mighty deeds of the heroes of one generation became in succeeding generations the cherished possessions of their family and their tribe. The stories were repeated with pride, and, as time went on, the actual deeds of the fighting man were picturesquely exaggerated until he came to be regarded either as himself a god or as the chosen protégé of a legion of gods. These individual achievements were intimately associated with the history of the tribes to which the heroes belonged, and, thus, when men first began to write, there was a vast amount of biographical and historical tradition already in existence in the world, known by heart by scores and hundreds of different persons and ready for the scribe permanently to preserve.

But even myths, vast as was the ground they covered, and heroic legends did not exhaust the material ready to the hand of the first man who learned to write. The associated life necessarily leads to accepted custom and convention. It is impossible for a number of individuals to live together in a family or in a tribe without observing certain rules. These rules become more stringent and, at the same time, more interesting when they are associated with certain recurring events. The outstanding events in every human life are birth, death, and marriage, and with each of these certain traditional ceremonies were soon generally observed. The changing seasons also brought with them ceremonies, originally intended for the placation of the gods, and springtime and harvest, the sowing of the seed and the reaping of the crops, became red-letter days in the primitive man's year. These customs and ceremonies also supplied a fertile field for the first scribes. In addition there was ready for them a vast oral collection of nursery stories, closely

allied of course with the more terrifying myths, of proverbs and of droll sayings, mostly comments on the familiar incidents of life.

§ 6

Poetry is far older than writing. It has now been established that the folk-songs of the European peoples, still repeated and sung by peasants in out-of-the-way villages, are an "immemorial inheritance." Andrew Lang says:

Their present form, of course, is relatively recent: in centuries of oral recitation the language altered automatically, but the stock situations and ideas of many romantic ballads are of dateless age and worldwide diffusion.

The very name ballad suggests the method by which men first began to arrive at the rhythmical arrangement of words. "Ballad" is derived from the old French verb baller, which meant to dance, and the ballad was originally a song sung by a dancer, the words necessarily accompanying the movement. The custom of improvising words to fit a dance still exists in Russia and in the Pyrenees. Puttenham, an English writer of the sixteenth century, says in his Art of English Poesie:

Poesie is more ancient than the artificiall of the Greeks and Latines, and used of the ancient and uncivill who were before all science and civilitie.

These early songs and dances were the first artistic expression of emotion. With them primitive men found (again to quote Andrew Lang) "the appropriate relief of their emotions in moments of high-wrought feeling or on solemn occasions." In addition, therefore, to the stories and legends and myths, the biographies of traditional heroes and the records of families and tribes, the first professional literary man had a store of popular

This "Stone" is a portion of a large black basalt stele measuring 3 feet 9 inches by 2 feet 41⁄2 inches, and is inscribed with fourteen lines of hieroglyphics, thirty-two lines of demotic, and fifty-four lines of Greek. It was found in 1798 by a French officer of artillery named Boussard, among the ruins of Fort Saint Julien, near the Rosetta mouth of the Nile, and was removed, in 1799, to the Institut National at Cairo, to be examined by the learned; and Napoleon ordered the inscription to be engraved and copies of it to be submitted to the scholars and learned societies of Europe. In 1801 it passed into the possession of the British, and it was sent to England in February 1802. It was exhibited for a few months in the rooms of the Society of Antiquaries, and then was finally deposited in the British Museum. From this inscription was first obtained the key to the decipherment of the hieroglyphics and the interpretation of the ancient language of Egypt; the names of the Kings, which in the hieroglyphics are enclosed within oblong rings or "cartouches," giving the clue to the identification of the letters of the hieroglyphic alphabet.

songs to write down on his papyrus, and it is clear that these songs were the beginning of all poetry, poetry having been defined by Mr. Watts-Dunton as "the concrete and artistic expression of the human mind in emotional and rhythmical language." It is important to note that in poetry as well as in prose the initial impulse was absolutely popular. The common dreams and aspirations were the subject of the unknown poets, who gave them a new and greater beauty. This early popular art was followed by the development of a definite poetry of personality, the expression of particular rather than general emotion, which was an aristocratic and not a democratic possession. The extent to which the folk-song belonged to the people has been proved by the continuance of its popularity into the centuries of progress and civilisation. In the Golden Age of Greece and Rome, few men could read and fewer still could write. But most men could sing, and many men could improvise songs. In the dark centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire, books had few readers, but songs were still sung. The new learning that came with the Renaissance hardly affected the common people, and the power to read and write has only become general during the last hundred years. But through all the ages the unlettered have possessed a spoken literature of their own-stories and songs, the same in substance as the stories repeated and the songs sung by primitive tribesmen long before the beginning of historical records.

There is no more interesting and important fact in human history than the similarity of folk-songs and legends. The same stories are common to all the peoples of the world, and there is an amazing similarity between the subjects of the songs of the East and the songs of the West. A great and entertaining literature has been written round this subject in recent times. In these pages it has been sufficient to suggest the origins of romantic literature and to point out the vast store of material that was waiting for the first literary artist. Early literature