its climax pointed, its narration consistent and its description apt—the tale yet remains to be told. The telling of the tale is a distinct art governed by distinct principles because the life of the story must be transmitted and rendered into voice.
Story-telling is one of the most ancient and universal of arts. Concerning this art Thackeray has said:—
Stories exist everywhere: there is no calculating the distance through which stories have come to us, the number of languages through which they have been filtered, or the centuries during which they have been told. Many of them have been narrated almost in their present shape for thousands of years to the little copper-colored Sanskrit children, listening to their mothers under the palm-trees by the banks of the yellow Jumna—their Brahmin mother, who softly narrated them through the ring in her nose. The very same tale has been heard by the northern Vikings as they lay on their shields on deck; and the Arabs couched under the stars on the Syrian plains when their flocks were gathered in, and their mares were picketed by the tents.
In his Roundabout Papers, Thackeray gives a picture of a score of white-bearded, white-robed warriors or grave seniors of the city, seated at the gate of Jaffa or Beyrout, listening to the story-teller reciting his marvels out of Arabian Nights. "A Reading from Homer," by Alma Tadema, is a well-known picture which portrays the Greeks listening to the Tales of Homer. In the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, the chorus of old men begins with, "I will tell ye a story!" Plutarch, in his Theseus says, "All kinds of stories were told at the festival Oschophoria, as the mothers related
