he Conflict between Romanticism and Classicism.--The influences of
this period were not entirely in the direction of romanticism. Samuel
Johnson, the literary dictator of the age, was unsparing in his
condemnation of the movement. The weight of his opinion kept many
romantic tendencies in check. Even authors like Gray were afraid to
adopt the new creed in its entirety. In one stanza of his _Hymn to
Adversity_ we find four capitalized abstractions, after the manner of
the classical school: Folly, Noise, Laughter, Prosperity; and the
following two lay figures, little better than abstractions:--

"The summer Friend, the flattering Foe."

These abstractions have little warmth or human interest. After Gray
had studied the Norse mythology, we find him using such strong
expressions as "iron-sleet of arrowy shower." Collins's ode on _The
Passions_ contains seventeen personified abstractions, from "pale
Melancholy" to "brown Exercise."

The conflict between these two schools continues; and many people
still think that any poetry which shows polished regularity must be
excellent. To prove this statement, we have only to turn to the
magazines and glance at the current poetry, which often consists of
words rather artificially strung together without the soul of feeling
or of thought.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN NOVEL

The Growth of Prose Fiction.--Authentic history does not take us
back to the time when human beings were not solaced by tales. The
_Bible_ contains stories of marked interest. _Beowulf_, the medieval
romances, the _Canterbury Tales_, and the ballads relate stories in
verse.

For a long time the knight and his adventures held the place of honor
in fiction; but the time came when improbable or impossible
achievements began to pall. The knight who meets with all kinds of
adventures and rescues everybody, is admirably burlesqued in _Don
Quixote_ by the Spanish author Cervantes, which appeared at the
beginning of the seventeenth century. This world-famous romance shows
by its ridicule that the taste for the impossible adventures of
chivalry was beginning to pall. The following title to one of the
chapters of _Don Quixote_ is sufficiently suggestive: "Chapter
LVIII.--Which tells how Adventures came crowding on Don Quixote in
Such Numbers that they gave him No Breathing Time."

Much prose fiction was written during the Elizabethan Age. We have
seen that Lyly's _Euphues_ and Sidney's _Arcadia_ contain the germs