LONGUS, the Greek romancer. Nothing is known of the life of the author of Daphnis and Chloe, and it is only inferred from some apparent imitations of the Aethiopica of Heliodorus that he wrote after the time of Theodosius. He may therefore be placed in the 5th century. His position in literature is interesting and not unimportant: he represents the romantic spirit of expiring classicism, the yearning of a highly artificial society for primitive simplicity, and the endeavour to create a corresponding ideal. The little idyl in the seventh oration of Dion Chrysostom is a beautiful example of this tendency three centuries before Longus, and the letters of Synesius, nearly in his own day, attest a genuine feeling for nature and a country life. In its literary aspect, nevertheless, this movement has little in common with the return to pure nature which inspired a Wordsworth, or the realism of George Sand’s delineations of the peasantry of Berri. Lougus’s style is rhetorical, and his shepherds and shepherdesses are wholly conventional. It is no small credit to him to have achieved so purely ideal a delineation with so little apparent affectation, and without any of the tediousness of almost all modern pastoral writers. If unable to blend the reality and ideality of the pastoral life as Shakespeare has done in As You Like It and The Winter's Tale, he has nevertheless imparted real human interest to a purely fanciful picture, and shows no little knowledge of human nature in his delineation of the growth of a passionate attachment between two innocent children. Daphnis and Chloe were probably the prototypes of Paul and Virginia; and, notwithstanding the naïveté of some details, the Greek has a decided advantage over the Frenchman in the simplicity and sincerity which ...