The Greek classics--the matchless monuments of ancient literature--as represented in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Homeric Hymns were preserved, perpetuated, and disseminated for generations if not for centuries, not by written records--as later literature has been handed down by the written or printed page--but through ballads, minstrelsy, and recitation. "The Æolic emigrants who settled in the north-west of Asia-Minor brought with them the warlike legends of their chiefs--the Archæan princes of old. These legends lived in the ballads of the Æolic minstrels, and from them passed southward into Ionia, where the Ionian poets gradually shaped them into higher artistic form."[5] "Mahaffy and Jevons are in accord," says Mr. Putnam, "in pointing out that the effort of memory required for the composition and transmission of long poems without the aid of writing, while implying a power never manifested among people possessing printed books, is not in itself at all incredible. Memory was equal to the task, and the earlier Greeks poems, memorized by the authors as composed, were preserved by successive generations of bards." And again he says, "It is to be borne in mind that the (to us) extraordinary extent to which the Greeks were able to develop their power of memorizing enabled them often to trust their memory where modern students would be helpless without the written (or printed) word.... The boys in school were given as their daily task the memorizing of the works of the poets, and what was begun under compulsion appears to have been continued in later life as a pleasure."[6] And in the preface of the book from which the foregoing statements are quoted, the author says, "It is evident that there were literary productions in advance, and probably very far in advance, of the discovery or evolution of literary characters, and also long after the use of script by authors, the greater portion of the public in all ancient lands received their literature, not through their eyes, but through their ears,--not by reading the text, but by listening to reciters, story-tellers, and 'rhapsodists.'" (P. xiv.) We quote the following from Mr. E. C. Richardson: "The Vedas were, it is alleged, handed down for centuries by a rigidly trained body of memorizers. The memorizing of Confucian books by Chinese students and of the Koran by Moslem students is very exact."[7] "The office of reading," says Professor Dobschütz, "was esteemed so highly that it was regarded as based on a special spiritual gift.... The reader had to know his text almost entirely by heart to do it well. From the 'Shepherd of Hermes,' a very interesting book written by a Roman layman about 140 A. D., we learn that some people gathered often, probably daily, for the special purpose of common reading and learning. But even granted that the memory of these men was not spoiled by too much reading, as is ours, so that by hearing they were able to learn by heart (it is said of some rabbis that they did not lose one word of all their master had told them, and, in fact, the Talmudic literature was transmitted orally for centuries), nevertheless, we must assume that these Christians had their private copies of the Bible at home."[8] Prescott says of the pre-historic Mexico: "Besides the hieroglyphic maps, the traditions of the country were embodied in songs and hymns.... These were various, embracing the mystic legends of a heroic age, the warlike achievements of their own, or the softer tales of love and pleasure."[9] Of the early times of English literature, D'Israeli states that "before the people had national books they had national songs," and that "these songs and these fables, these proverbs and these tales,--all these were a library without books."[10] And an anonymous author, recently traveling in a remote portion of northern Albania, records it that "the wild, inaccessible country is under various independent tribes, ruled by a chieftain according to unwritten laws handed down orally from remote ages." He also states that "the country has no written language and no literature."[11]