t a century of invention--from Ford to Congreve, does not
add a single piece of any considerable merit to the roll of English
books. As for a masterpiece, there is nothing in respect of which the
use of such a word would not be purely ridiculous. And yet the attempts
are interesting to the historian, and should not be uninteresting to the
historical student of literature. One or two of them have a sort of
shadowy name and place in literary history already.

In tracing their progress and character, we must allow for two native
models: and for three foreign sources, one ancient, two modern, of
influence. _The Arcadia_ and _Euphues_, the former continuously, the
latter by revival after an interval, exercised very great effect in the
first half of the seventeenth century, during at least the earlier part
of which the vogue of _Amadis_ and its successors, as Englished by
Anthony Munday and others, likewise continued. The Greek romances also
had much to do with the matter: for the Elizabethan translators had
introduced them to the vulgar, and the seventeenth century paid a good
deal of attention to Greek. Then, when that century itself was on its
way, the pastoral romance of D'Urfe first, and the Calprenede-Scudery
productions in the second place, came to give a fresh impulse, and
something of a new turn. The actual translations of French and Spanish
romance, shorter and longer, good, bad, and indifferent, are of immense
bulk and doubtless excited imitation: but we cannot possibly deal with
them here. A bare list would fill a chapter. But some work of more or
less (generally less) originality, in at least adaptation, calls for a
little individual notice: and some general characterisation may be
added.

It may be desirable to prelude the story by a reminder to the reader
that the _general_ characteristics of these various sources were
"harlequin" in their diversity of apparent colour. The _Amadis_ romances
and, indeed, all the later examples of that great kind, such as _Arthur
of Little Britain_, which Berners translated, were distinguished on the
one side by a curious convention of unsmooth running of the course of
love, on the other sometimes by a much greater licence of morality than
their predecessors, and always by a prodigality of the "conjuror's
supernatural"--witches and giants and magic black and white. The Spanish
"picaresque" story was pretty real but even less decent: and its French
imitations (though not usually