dered. I betook me,' he writes, among those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious kings, and from hence had in renown all over Christendom.' In Il Penseroso he refers to Chaucer's Squire's tale with evident admiration—a tale left half-told by Chaucer, but completed, it is to be noted, by Spenser-and would have called up for himself and resung other poetry also of that strain,

If aught else great bards beside

In sage and solemn tunes have sung,

Of turneys and of trophies hung ;

Of forests and enchantments drear,

When more is meant than meets the ear.

The great epic poem was at last composed with a far different subject than that originally proposed by its author; the fascination of the old Romances was in part dispelled; Milton made his final election truthfully to his own nature and his own moral and spiritual environment. Yet we can see what knowledge he had gathered, what pictures his imagination had conceived of the old days of chivalry, when he speaks of

What resounds

In fable or romance of Uther's son,

Begirt with British and Armoric knights;

or when he compares the hall of Pandemonium to

A covered field where champions bold

Wont ride in arm'd and at the Soldan's chair

Defied the best of Panim chivalry

To mortal combat or career with lance.

Dryden's earlier plays are, in a word, as Scott describes them, dramatised metrical Romances. The Romances most popular in his day, and, indeed, for some time before

were of Spanish origin, belonging to the cycle of Amadis de Gaul, which, though primarily in all probability of Portuguese extraction, had been abundantly cultivated and expanded in Spain. There is a highly amusing evidence of the favour enjoyed by the knightly fictions of the Peninsula in a play by Beaumont and Fletcher, called The Knight of the Burning Pestle. There a young grocer called Ralph appears perusing Palmerin of England (it should have been Palmerin d'Oliva, for from it, not Palmerin of England, the passages quoted come), and presently, to the intense delight of an old grocer and his wife, determines to turn grocer-errant. 'What brave spirit,' exclaims the high-minded youth, 'could be content to sit in his shop with a flappet of wood and a blue apron before him, selling mithridatum, that might pursue feats of arms, and through his noble achievements procure such a famous history to be written of his heroic prowess?' So he furnishes himself with a pair of squires in the shape of two apprentices, and sets forth. He gets into some difficulty about his hotel bills; for the times were unenthusiastic, and innkeepers objected to knights-errant that did not pay their way; but he manages to perform some great exploits.

George (says the old grocer's wife), let Ralph travel over great hills, and let him be very weary, and come to the King of Cracovia's house covered with velvet, and there let the king's daughter stand in her window all in beaten gold, combing her golden locks with a comb of ivory; and let her spy Ralph and fall in love with him, and come down to him and carry him into her father's house, and then let Ralph talk with her!

This play may suggest, perhaps, a suspicion of what, in fact, befell the Romances of Chivalry both in their metrical and their prose shapes. They were abandoned by the better educated classes to the admiration of the common people. They fell from the high estate they had held in the

world of letters; they were banished from the fine society which had once so eagerly countenanced and caressed them; they found a welcome with less well-lettered, simpler folk. It is certain that the air in which the author of the Pilgrim's Progress grew up was resonant with the songs and stories of Romance. Ballad singers were going to and fro about the country, furnished no doubt with songs of an immediate political import-for ballads in those days did in some sort the work which newspaper articles do now-but furnished also with many a rhymed legend of the olden time, to which unlearned crowds listened with rapt ears. Bunyan may have made one of many such a crowd in various parts of the country visited by him with the itinerant tinker his father, and with half unconscious delight heard old ditties which were to bear fruit in him passing wonderful. Moreover, these same old pieces-these fragments of a decaying literature-were circulating in Bunyan's time in the form of cheap books. His immortal allegory is, like the Faerie Queene, but a spiritual romance; it overflows in the same incidents, adventures, enterprises that compose the medieval tales, curiously interwoven with the life-scenery of the Commonwealth and the Restoration.

Not again did the seeds of Romance, sown by the wayside, fall into such soil as the mind of Bunyan.

We can now, when our space is so nearly exhausted, only just remind our readers of the once famous popular Heroic Romances, and of the famous Comic Romances which were born of the old Romances of Chivalry, whose history we have been cursorily reviewing. The old prose Romance, interwedded with what was called the Pastoral Romance-a form of literature in part originated in the Middle Ages, in the main imitated from certain late Greek productions-reappeared in the form of such

works as Montemayor's Diana, and Sydney's Arcadia. From these works the heroic romance was directly descended. We suppose no living person has indulged himself in the complete perusal of the twelve volumes of Cleopatre or of Pharamond; the ten of Clélie; the 'twelve huge' ones of the Grand Cyrus. Yet these were the favourite reading of ladies and gentleman for near a hundred years—from about the middle of the seventeenth to that of the eighteenth century. Their leading characteristics are defined, by one who in her day, as she says, 'drudged through them,' and was 'still alive,' to be unnatural representations of the passions, false sentiments, false precepts, false honour, and false modesty, with a strange heap of improbable, unnatural incidents, mixed up with true history, and fastened upon some of the great names of antiquity. In a word, there was but slight connection between them and life; they were rife with affectations; they were dyed deep with a sort of mental euphuism. Molière laughed at them; Boileau exposed and derided them. Not being founded on the rock of truth to nature, they soon showed signs of decay, soon tottered and fell. Their downfall was completed in the year 1740 by the outcoming of a book called Pamela-a book written with no lofty design of overthrowing the literary dynasty then in power and founding a new one; and yet these were the remarkable feats it achieved. From that day the novel dethroned the Heroic Romance.

As for the Comic Romance, that naturally enough sprung up by the side of the Serious one. The preposterous unreality of the Chivalrous Romances, especially when the lives of the old poems were prolonged into an age for which they were not born-into an age that had little and decreasing sympathy with the sentiments out of which they had arisen ---soon awakened laughter. We have seen how Chaucer,

who lived near the time of their greatest prosperity, himself parodied them, though his contemporaries, perhaps, sympathised little with his ridicule. No wonder if in later ages, Rabelais, Cervantes, Scarron, all laughed them to scorn. Still less wonder if other writers thought it no profanity to use the form and machinery of them for their own purposes, as eminently Butler used them-with much derision, by the way when he sketched the famous knight Sir Hudibras, in that memorable mock-romance called, with all propriety, after its hero. The arguments of that work are merely perverted inventories, so to say, of the contents of many an old Romance of Chivalry.

To return, for one last moment, to the Chivalrous Romances themselves. We have now traced their career from the time of their rise and their glory to the age of their decay and obscurity; from the time when kings' palaces and baronial halls resounded with them, to that when they found favour only with the simplest and rudest classes of society; from the time when they were sung by the medieval minstrel, in all his pride and splendour, to the gayest audiences, to when, in marred, mutilated form, they were trolled forth by the vagrant balladmonger to the humblest crowds in the bye-lanes and among the hedges of the country. In the last century there arose generations that knew not King Arthur and his Knights. The Romances of Chivalry sank into deep neglect. To be brief, out of this obscurity they were brought once more into the light by the vital change of literary taste and feeling which inevitably accompanied the tremendous political revolutions in the midst of which the eighteenth century closed. About the beginning of this present century Europe began to recall the 'Old Romances sung beside her in her youth.' The long forgotten old poems were in some sort brought back into the knowledge of men