eans all but too many of their English imitations. Some of the faults
which are part cause of these others they indeed have--the apparently
irrational catalogues of birds and beasts, stuffs and vegetables; the
long moralisings; the religious passages sometimes (as it may seem to
mere moderns) interposed in very odd contexts; the endless descriptions
of battles and single combats; the absence of striking characterisation
and varied incident. Their interest is a peculiar interest, yet one can
hardly call the taste for it "an acquired taste," because the very
large majority of healthy and intelligent children delight in these
stories under whatever form they are presented to them, and at least a
considerable number of grown-up persons never lose the enjoyment. The
disapproval which rested on "romances of chivalry" for a long time was
admittedly ignorant and absurd; and the reasons why this disapproval, at
least in its somewhat milder form of neglect, has never been wholly
removed, are not very difficult to discover. It is to be feared that
_Don Quixote_, great as it is, has done not a little mischief, and by
virtue of its greatness is likely to do not a little more, though the
_Amadis_ group, which it specially satirises, has faults not found in
the older tales. The texts, though in most cases easily enough
accessible now, are not what may be called obviously and yet
unobtrusively so. They are to a very large extent issued by learned
societies: and the public, not too unreasonably, is rather suspicious,
and not at all avid, of the products of learned societies. They are
accompanied by introductions and notes and glossaries--things the
public (again not wholly to be blamed) regards without cordiality.
Latterly they have been used for educational purposes, and anything
used for educational purposes acquires an evil--or at least an
unappetising--reputation. In some cases they have been messed and
meddled in _usum vulgi_. But their worst enemy recently has been, it may
be feared, the irreconcilable opposition of their spirit to what is
called the modern spirit--though this latter sometimes takes them up and
plays with them in a fashion of maudlin mysticism.

[Sidenote: _Partenopeus of Blois_ selected for analysis and
translation.]

To treat them at large here as Ellis treated some of the English
imitations would be impossible in point of scale and dangerous as a
competition; for Ellis, though a little too prone to Voltairiani