392 COSMOS. 



was adopted as the religion of the State, it not only exercised 

 a beneficial influence on the condition of the lower classes, by 

 inculcating the social freedom of mankind, but also expanded 

 the views of men in their communion with nature. The 

 eye no longer rested on the forms of Olympic gods. The 

 fathers of the Church, in their rhetorically correct and often 

 poetically imaginative language, now taught that the Creator 

 showed himself great in inanimate no less than in animate 

 nature, and in the wild strife of the elements no less than in 

 the still activity of organic development. At the gradual dis- 

 solution of the Roman dominion, creative imagination, sim- 

 plicity, and purity of diction disappeared from the writings of 

 that dreary age, first in the Latin territories, and then in 

 Grecian Asia Minor. A taste for solitude, for mournful con- 

 templation, and for a moody absorption of mind may be 

 traced simultaneously in the style and colouring of the 

 language. Whenever a new element seems to develope 

 itself in the feelings of mankind, it may almost invariably 

 be traced to an earlier deep-seated individual germ. Thus 

 the softness of Mimnermus* has often been regarded as 

 the expression of a general sentimental direction of the 

 mind. The ancient world is not abruptly separated from 

 the modern, but modifications in the religious sentiments 

 and the tenderest social feelings of men, and changes in the 

 special habits of those who exercise an influence on the ideas 

 of the mass, must give a sudden predominance to that which 

 might previously have escaped attention. It was the ten- 

 dency of the Christian mind to prove from the order of the 

 universe and the beauty of nature the greatness and goodness 

 of the Creator. This tendency to glorify the Deity in His 

 works, gave rise to a taste for natural description. The 

 earliest and most remarkable instances of this kind are to be 

 met with in the writings of Minucius Felix, a rhetorician and 

 lawyer at Rome, who lived in the beginning of the third 

 century, and was the contemporary of Tertullian and Philo- 

 stratus. We follow with pleasure the delineation of his twi- 

 light rambles on the shore near Ostia, which he describes as 

 more picturesque and more conducive to health than we find 

 it in the present day. In the religious discourse, entitled 



* On elegiac poetry, consult Nicol. Bach, m the Ally. Schul-Zeituny, 

 1829, abth. ii., No. 134, s. 1097. 



