ks did very little writing in prose until the era of their
decadence, and showed little instinct to use the concise and unified
form of the short-story. The conquering Romans followed closely in the
paths of their predecessors and did little work in the shorter
narratives. The myths of Greece and Rome were not bound by facts, and
opened a wonderland where writers were free to roam. The epics were
slow in movement, and presented a list of loosely organized stories
arranged about some character like Ulysses or AEneas.

During the mediaeval period story-tellers and stories appeared
everywhere. The more ignorant of these story-tellers produced the
fable, and the educated monks produced the simple, crude and
disjointed tales. The _Gesta Romanorum_ is a wonderful storehouse of
these mediaeval stories. In the _Decameron_ Boccaccio deals with
traditional and contemporary materials. He is a born story-teller and
presents many interesting and well-told narratives, but as Professor
Baldwin[1] has said, more than half are merely anecdotes, and the
remaining stories are bare plots, ingeniously done in a kind of
scenario form. Three approach our modern idea of the short-story, and
two, the second story of the second day and the sixth story of the
ninth day, actually attain to our standard. Boccaccio was not
conscious of a standard in short-story telling, for he had none in the
sense that Poe and Maupassant defined and practiced it. Chaucer in
England told his stories in verse and added the charm of humor and
well defined characters to the development of story-telling.

In the seventeenth century Cervantes gave the world its first great
novel, _Don Quixote_. Cervantes was careless in his work and did not
write short-stories, but tales that are fairly brief. Spain added to
the story a high sense of chivalry and a richness of character that
the Greek romance and the Italian novella did not possess. France
followed this loose composition and lack of beauty in form. Scarron
and Le Sage, the two French fiction writers of this period,
contributed little or nothing to the advancement of story-telling.
Cervantes' _The Liberal Lover_ is as near as this period came to
producing a real short-story.

The story-telling of the seventeenth century was largely shaped by the
popularity of the drama. In the eighteenth century the drama gave
place to the essay, and it is to the sketch and essay that we must go
to trace the evolution of the story duri