26 DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURAL SCENERY 



greatness and goodness of the Creator from the order of the 

 universe and the beauty of nature ; and this desire to glorify 

 the Deity through his works, favoured a disposition for 

 natural descriptions. We find the earliest and most detailed 

 instances of this kind in the writings of Minucius Felix, a 

 rhetorician and advocate living in Borne in the beginning 

 of the third century, and a contemporary of Tertullian and 

 Philostratus. We follow him with pleasure in the evening 

 twilight to the sea shore near Ostia, which, indeed, he 

 describes as more picturesque, and more favourable to 

 health, than we now find it. The religious discourse 

 entitled " Octavius" is a spirited defence of the new faith 

 against the attacks of a heathen friend ( 44 ) . 



This is the place for introducing from the Greek fathers of 

 the church extracts descriptive of natural scenes, which are 

 probably less known to my readers than are the evidences of 

 the ancient Italian love for a rural life contained in Roman 

 literature. I will begin with a letter of the great Basil, 

 which has long been an especial favourite with me. Basil, 

 who was a native of Cesarea in Cappadocia, left the pleasures 

 of Athens when little more than thirty years of age, and, 

 having already visited the Christian hermitages of Ccelo- 

 Syria and Upper Egypt, withdrew, like the Essenes and 

 Therapeuti before Christianity, into a wilderness adjacent to 

 the Armenian river Iris. His second brother, Naucratius ( 45 ), 

 had been drowned there while engaged in fishing, after 

 leading for five years the life of a rigid anchorite. Basil 

 writes to his friend Gregory of Nazianzum, "I believe I 

 have at last found the end of my wanderings : my hopes of 

 uniting myself with thee my pleasing dreams, I should 

 rather say, for the hopes of men have been justly called 



