The adventures of the Yellow Diamond begin with the eleventh century of the Christian era.
One age followed another until the first years of the eighteenth Christian century saw the reign of Aurungzebe, Emperor of the Moguls.
This was Carlo Goldoni, one of the first of the realists, but antedating conscious realism so long as to have been born at Venice early in the eighteenth
century, and to have come to his hand-to-hand fight with the romanticism of his day almost before that
century had reached its noon.
Herodotus indeed puts both poets 400 years before his own time; that is, at about 830-820 B.C., and the evidence stated above points to the middle of the ninth
century as the probable date for the "Works and Days".
And what would a sub-chanter of the sixteenth
century say, on beholding the beautiful yellow wash, with which our archiepiscopal vandals have desmeared their cathedral?
Elizabethan prose, all too chaotic in the beauty and force which overflowed into it from Elizabethan poetry, and incorrect with an incorrectness which leaves it scarcely legitimate prose at all: then, in reaction against that, the correctness of Dryden, and his followers through the eighteenth
century, determining the standard of a prose in the proper sense, not inferior to the prose of the Augustan age in Latin, or of the "great age in France": and, again in reaction against this, the wild mixture of poetry and prose, in our wild nineteenth
century, under the influence of such writers as Dickens and Carlyle: such are the three periods into which the story of our prose literature divides itself.
The Britons, before and during the Roman occupation, to the fifth
century. B.
Mezeriac, the life of Aesop was from the pen of Maximus Planudes, a monk of Constantinople, who was sent on an embassy to Venice by the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus the elder, and who wrote in the early part of the fourteenth
century. His life was prefixed to all the early editions of these fables, and was republished as late as 1727 by Archdeacon Croxall as the introduction to his edition of Aesop.
For a time, I used to wake up, mornings, and smile at my "dream," and listen for the Colt's factory whistle; but that sort of thing played itself out, gradually, and at last I was fully able to realize that I was actually living in the sixth
century, and in Arthur's court, not a lunatic asylum.
Once or twice in the course of a
century I unclose my lips.
These old Irish manuscripts are perhaps none of them older than the eleventh
century, but the stories are far, far older.
Too late did the socialist movement of the early twentieth
century divine the coming of the Oligarchy.