example, an episode in the romance of Alexander, a story of
maidens in a forest, who sink underground in winter and reappear in
spring in the shape of flowers: it will be vainly sought for in
Callisthenes; it is of Eastern origin, and is found in Edrisi. For want
of better, and to avoid the trouble of naming names, the authors will
sometimes refer their public to "Latin books," and such was the renown
of Rome that the reader asked nothing more.

No need to add that manners and dresses were scarcely better observed
than probability. Everything in these poems was really _translated_; not
only the language of the ancients, but their raiment, their
civilisation, their ideas. Venus becomes a princess; the heroes are
knights, and their costumes are so much in the fashion of the day that
they serve us to date the poems. The miniatures conform to the tale;
tonsured monks bear Achilles to the grave; they carry tapers in their
hands. Queen Penthesilea, "doughty and bold, and beautiful and
virtuous," rides astride, her heels armed with huge red spurs.[175]
Oedipus is dubbed a knight; AEneas takes counsel of his "barons." This
manner of representing antiquity lasted till the Renaissance; and till
much later, on the stage. Under Louis XIV., Augustus wore a perruque
"in-folio"; and in the last century Mrs. Hartley played Cleopatra in
_paniers_ on the English stage.

In accordance with these ideas were written in French, for the benefit
of the conquerors of England, such tales as the immense "Roman de
Troie," by Benoit de Sainte-More, in which is related, for the first
time in any modern language, the story of Troilus and Cressida; the
"Roman de Thebes," written about 1150; that of "Eneas," composed during
the same period; the History of Alexander, or the "Roman de toute
Chevalerie," a vast compilation, one of the longest and dullest that be,
written in the beginning of the thirteenth century by Eustace or Thomas
of Kent; the Romance of "Ipomedon," and the Romance of "Prothesilaus,"
by Hue of Rotelande, composed before 1191; and many others besides[176]:
all romances destined to people of leisure, delighting in long
descriptions, in prodigious adventures, in enchantments, in
transformations, in marvels. Alexander converses with trees who foretell
the future to him; he drinks from the fountain of youth; he gets into a
glass barrel lighted by lamps, and is let down to the bottom of the sea,
where he watches the gambols of marine monst