ations from the classes which exercise the prerogatives of
government in Europe in modern times. The nobles then were military
chieftains, living in camps or in walled cities, which they built for
the accommodation of themselves and their followers. These chieftains
were not barbarians. They were in a certain sense cultivated and
refined. They gathered around them in their camps and in their courts
orators, poets, statesmen, and officers of every grade, who seem to
have possessed the same energy, genius, taste, and in some respects
the same scientific skill, which have in all ages and in every clime
characterized the upper classes of the Caucasian race. They carried
all the arts which were necessary for their purposes and plans to high
perfection, and in the invention of tales, ballads and poems, to be
recited at their entertainments and feasts, they evinced the most
admirable taste and skill;--a taste and skill which, as they resulted
not from the operation and influence of artificial rules, but from the
unerring instinct of genius, have never been surpassed. In fact, the
poetical inventions of those early days, far from having been
produced in conformity with rules, were entirely precedent to rules,
in the order of time. Rules were formed from them; for they at length
became established themselves in the estimation of mankind, as models,
and on their authority as models, the whole theory of rhetorical and
poetical beauty now mainly reposes.

The people of those days formed no idea of a spiritual world, or of a
spiritual divinity. They however imagined, that heroes of former days
still continued to live and to reign in certain semi-heavenly regions
among the summits of their blue and beautiful mountains, and that they
were invested there with attributes in some respects divine. In
addition to these divinities, the fertile fancy of those ancient times
filled the earth, the air, the sea, and the sky with imaginary beings,
all most graceful and beautiful in their forms, and poetical in their
functions,--and made them the subjects, too, of innumerable legends
and tales, as graceful, poetical, and beautiful as themselves. Every
grove, and fountain, and river,--every lofty summit among the
mountains, and every rock and promontory along the shores of the
sea,--every cave, every valley, every water-fall, had its imaginary
occupant,--the genius of the spot; so that every natural object which
attracted public notice at all, was