The Sun.
London, England, 1866-02-12 00:00:00

readers' perception, the fact we are here desirous.°f
their so realising as a means
of affording
them a clearer and juster appreciation of the
exceptionally appropriate character of the
present work as a product of the ripened powers
of Sir Bulwer Lytton at once as Poet and
as Novelist. " Time has spared no remains,
he reminds us in the very first sentence of
his Preface to the Eight Poems making UP
the contents of this new volume—" Time has spared
no remains, in their original form, of those famous
' Tales of Miletus,' which - are generally considered,
to be the remote progenitors of the modern Novel.
It is appropriate, therefore, that the great gas-
ter of the Modern Novel should of all men livinglloo
been the one to celebrate thus after so many genera-
tons those all but forgotten Tales of Miletus, from
which the Novel in its later form may thus be said to
have remotely emanated. But it is especially appro-
priate that the celebration of them, that the revivift"
cation, almost it might be said there-creation, of theta
should have been undertaken by him as a
labour of
love, necessitating as it is does for its just and ale"
quate fufilment the combination in the man of letters
so undertaking the task, not only the skill of the
practised romancist or raconteur, but with that aise
the acquired capacity of the Scholar, and the inborngenius of the Poet. What are here, in Wi'
three obvious essentials in the author of any such
volume as this, are sound scholarship, poetic si°2-
pathy, and constructive skill. And they are liere•
i
thoSe essentials--not alone discoverable when sought
for like the kernel of a peach—they are, rather I
discernible at a glance like the bloom upon lt°
surface. Yet the task thus accomplished was
manifestly in its very nature one of exceeding diff;-
culty. It was not, strictly speaking, that of ad-
venturing into " fresh fields and pastures new
new these pastures are not assuredly, while Le
fields here penetrated, can only be regarded as so
fresh, for inasmuch as they have been lying falll
during so many centuries ! It is rather than tu7"
the " creating a soul under the very ribs of death'
or, more accurately still, to indicate the extraordinalJ
difficulty of the achievement here ambitioned by the
author of these " Lost Tales of Miletus," it has he:
one in some measure comparable to that accomplish
some few years since by Professor Owen, when from
the hint furnished by the transmission to him of
single bone from Australia he imagined to himself
and in fact minutely described the whole
oana-
tomical structure of a gigantic bird hitherto °.
dreamt of—a theoretical outline of an extinct c.,..rea.
ture, the philosophical accuracy of which the Jaw,
tory of Science afterwards relates to have been Wartes
vellously justified and verified by the discovery latio
on in Australia of a complete skeleton of thatgigau
creature, that Roc of our Antipodes 1 Yet it is often f
thus in effect in regard to these " Lost Tale's of
Miletus," that out of the merest fragment,
one solitary incident, out of some purely casual
ci
gestion, now in Ovid, now in Parthenius, the Wm„n.
fabric of a legendary tale is elaborately reewo.
strutted. " Out of such indications of the chilrs
l: re
ter and genius of thelost Milesian Fables, and7or
the remnants of myth and tale once in PI re.
favour, which may be found, not only in 13,11eLus
pertories of ancient legend as those of Apcue`^-0- e
and Conon, but scattered throughout
Scholiasts or in the pages of Pausanias and ,the.
nmus"—Sir Bulwer Lytton himself observese
have endeavoured to weave together a few stu"oo
that may serve as feeble specimens of the fato„
kinds of subject in which these ancestral 7n..
tellers may have exercised their faculties °f ~
vention. I have selected from Hellenic 1115:t n ilo o't
he then adds, " those in which the ground° in
pre-occupied, by the great poets of antiqui▪ tl'not
works yet extant ; and which, therefore, may id
be without the attraction of novelty to the geussa`v,
reader. In this selection," he goes 011 W
bads
as it appears to us quite unnecessarily, "I ._oe
i
avoided, of course, any of the more hcentiu
themes, to which, it is to be feared, the Bcee3ec hiole
of Miletus sometimes stooped their genius ; de,
I have endeavoured to take subjects whi▪
ch
pended for the popularity they once enjoyed on
elements congenial to art in every land and Iff
subjects readily lending themselves to
narra"_)o
construction or dramatic situation, and capable (
that degree of human interest which is esentlalfal
the successful employment of all the more fancl„.o
agencies of wonder." It is not only in the selecti
of his themes, however, that his book possess°. tlo
charm of novelty for the English reader; it is
. worked
r:
more, if we may so speak, in the manner
which he has thereupon (after that selection)
up those materials that his volume as a work
art assumes to itself an especial air of attractivenw.
i;
The audience, it should be observed, whose attenti_et.
apparently he alone aspires to gain while rec?°_,,,
ing these "Lost Tales of Miletus"—an audience'
by the way, that he is quite certain of wi▪ übio,
—is an audience of scholars, an audience cans:,
in fact, of appreciating the taste and the sal° is
ship lavished upon these pages. If there the
one, however out of the Eight Poems in.„ider
volume which is destined to win for itself a "
,lY
popularity, it is assuredly that to which (t„esib; the
for this very reason) the author has accorded„ in
first place in the collection. " The Secret WaY'raoe
truth, is a story appealing directly to the c°lll off
heart of humanity, for though it relates to the far ,
an the
Medes and Scythians, to the King Omartes -4001
Prince Zaraidres (here for the sake of et? into
softened, by the dropping of a consonant' the
Zaraides) —it relates also to the love-dreams anand
eventual recognition of two all but living
es of
breathing creatures of the human race, the I°voew
Argiope and of the Median Prince Zaraides• isite
that tale of love is told, let the following eicluranee
passage, descriptive of the character and aPPea:odi.
of Omartes' daughter, the Princess Argiope,
nrbled
sate here upon the instant, as by a prelude W
upon dulcimers and flagiolets

Men blest her when she moved before their eyes

Shame-faced, as blushing to be born so fair,
Mild as the child of gods
Violet-crowned Athens hallowing named "Pi*"
Now, of a sudden, over that bright face
There fell the shadow of some troubled thought,
As cloud, from purest dews

Updrawn, makes sorrowful a star in heaven:
And as a nightingale that having heard
A perfect music from some master's lyre,
Steals into coverts lone,
With her own melodies no more contented,
But haunted by the strain, till then unknown,
Seeks to re-sing it back, herself to charm,
Seeks still and ever fails,
Missing the key-note which unlocks the rausicr"
So, from her former pastimes in the choir

Of comrade virgins, stole Argiope,
Lone amid summer leaves
Brooding that thought which was her joy and -
The King discerned the change in his fair child,

And questioned oft, yet could not learn the cause ;
The sunny
'T bridge between
he lip and heart which childhood builds Was 1/I.°lce
Not more Aurora stealing into heaven
Conceals the mystic treasures of the deep
Whence with chaste blush she comes,
Than virgin bosoms guard their earliest secret. the
From
which one isolated fragment selected irons
tiao
earliest poem in the book, the peculiarity °f
experimental manner in which Sir Bulwer LaYt
ea
has employed the classic materials here gathers°.
together by him for the fabrication of these of
called " Lost Tales of Miletus," will be i115t313.0
ionsby and appreciated. It is the reslis
by him of a design, he tells us in his Preface, I°ng
01,1
cherished, but upon which he has only just 11601-
adventured—namely, the production of ``new eitiot
binations of blank or rhymeless metre compose
ref
in lines of arbitrary length and naodulatioA
which," he takes occasion to remark in Arp euthrin
"we have a few illustrious examples), but
the regularity and exactness of uniform stauir
The design is Horatian in its ehar.actiebss
and, we may say at once, that it vs
been most successfully accomplished. it,oubj.
been accomplished with a success that we BP' der
scarcely have conceived to have been possible notho
the circumstances, bearing in mind, that is, in
varied and subtle difficulties lying, as it werealii,
liter
00
ambush at every step (one is tempted to say
at every foot) against its accomplishment.
mere fragmentary passage already extracted ir
the earliest poem in the volume, nevertheless) 1g d
have clearly enough indicated the easy grageillo
elastic tread, so to speak, with which the
pathway has been traversed. But as an additio°
per