l scale was the
disapprobation of the humanists. Ascham, echoing Plato's condemnation of
Homer, attacks the romance of chivalry from the moral point of view, at
the same time cunningly associating it with "Papistrie." But he holds
the _novella_ even in greater abhorrence, for, after declaring that the
whole pleasure of the _Morte D'Arthur_ "standeth in two speciall
poyntes, in open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye," he goes on to say:
"and yet ten _Morte Arthurs_ do not a tenth part so much harm as one of
those bookes, made in Italy and translated in England[86]."

[86] _Schoolmaster_, p. 80.

But there were social as well as moral reasons for the depreciation of
Malory and Boccaccio. The taste of the age began to find these foreign
dishes, if not unpalatable, at least not sufficiently delicate. England
was fortunate in receiving the Reformation and the Renaissance at the
same time; and the men of those "spacious times" set before their eyes
that ideal of the courtier, so exquisitely embodied by Sir Philip
Sidney, in which godliness was not thought incompatible with refinement
of culture and graciousness of bearing. For the first time our country
became civilized in the full meaning of that word, and the knight,
shedding the armour of barbarism, became the gentleman, clothed in
velvet and silk. The romance of chivalry, therefore, became
old-fashioned; and it seemed for a time doomed to destruction until it
received a new lease of life, purged of mediaevalism and modernised by
the hands of Sidney himself, under the guise of arcadianism. While,
however, _Arcadia_ remained an undiscovered country, the needs of the
age were supplied by the "moral Court treatise." It was perhaps not so
much that the old stories found little response in the new form of
society, as that they did not reflect that society. We may well believe
that the taste for mirrors, which now became so fashionable, found its
psychological parallel in the desire of the Elizabethans to discover
their own fashions, their own affectations, themselves, in the stories
they read; and if this indeed be what is meant by realism in literature
that quality in the novel dates from those days. In this sense if in no
other, in the sense that he held, for the first time, a polished mirror
before contemporary life and manners, Lyly must be called the first of
English novelists.

_The Anatomy of Wit_, which it is most important to distinguish from its
sequel, was the de