irections. The bookseller "offer'd to be at
the charge of cutting my own face for the frontispiece, but I refused
his offer." As, however, the publisher insisted on having something, "I
design'd him this which is now a-cutting: Upon an altar dedicated to
Love, divers hearts transfix'd with arrows and darts are to lye broiling
upon the coals; and upon the steps of it, Hymen ... in a posture as if
he were going to light [his taper] to the altar; when Cupid is to come
behind him and pull him by the saffron sleeve, with these words
proceeding from his mouth: Nondum peracta sunt praeludia";[330] a
statement that is only too true and in which Loveday summarizes unawares
the truest criticism levelled at these romances. You may read volume
after volume, and still "nondum peracta sunt praeludia," you have not yet
done with preliminaries.

But this constant delaying of an event, sometimes announced, as in
"Clelie," at the top of the first page, was not in the least displeasing
to seventeenth-century readers. The lengthy episodes, the protracted
conversations, enchanted them; it was an age when conversation was at
its height in France, and from France the taste spread to other
countries. Translators, as we have seen, expressly mentioned as an
attraction in their books the help they would give to conversation.
Numberless examples of this polite pastime are provided in the heroic
romances; in "Almahide, or the Captive Queen,"[331] among others, we
read discussions as to whether it is better for a man to court a lady in
verse or in prose, whether an illiterate lover is better than a learned
one, &c., &c.

[Illustration: "HYMEN'S PRAELUDIA."

(_Frontispiece of the translation of La Calprenede's "Cleopatre."_)]

Such topics, and many more of a higher order, which were the subject of
persistent debate in the drawing-rooms of the Hotel de Rambouillet, were
also discussed in England; there was, it is true, no Hotel de
Rambouillet, but there was the house of the Philips at Cardigan. There
was no Marquise, but there was Catherine Philips, the "matchless
Orinda," who did much to acclimatize in England the refinements,
elegancies, and heroism _a panache_ of her French neighbours. With
the help of her friends she translated some of the plays of Corneille,
not without adding something to the original to make it look more
heroical. The little society gathered round her imitated the feigned
names bestowed upon the habitues of the Parisian hot