ABSTRACT
That the first people who possessed letters in the literal sense should also be the first people to possess letters in the literary sense, is no more than we should expect. Not, indeed, that the possession of an alphabet necessarily implies literary activity on the part of those who possess it. The Romans engraved their codes on tablets of stone and brass, and sculptured inscriptions on their public buildings, for centuries before they wrote histories and dramas, odes and satires. The Oscans, the Etruscans, and other early nations of Italy, never, so far as we know, got beyond mere inscriptions. Even the Greeks of the Ægean, as we are now just beginning to find out, were in possession of the Cadmæan alphabet some five or six centuries before the time of Homer; and yet we have no evidence that the Iliad was committed to writing earlier than some four hundred years after the death of the poet. Literature is, in fact, the fruit of leisure. Nations which are going through the struggle for existence call for soldiers, not scribes. The bard, the rhapsodist, the extemporaneous singer of war-chants and dirges, is the only representative of literature at that early stage in the history of a people; and it is not till the arts of peace have taken their place side by side with the arts of war, that poems are written, not sung—that histories are recorded with the pen, not carved out by the sword.
