hrh._ (Oppeln u.
Leipzig, 1891, i. 133 _note_) would rule Rabelais out of the history of
the novel altogether. This book, which will be quoted again with
gratitude later, displays a painstaking erudition not necessitating any
make-weight of sympathy for its author's early death after great
suffering. It is extremely useful; but it does not escape, in this and
other places, the censure which, ten years before the war of 1914, the
present writer felt it his duty to express on modern German critics and
literary historians generally (_History of Criticism_, London, 1904,
vol. iii. Bks. viii. and ix.), that on points of literary appreciation,
as distinguished from mere philology, "enumeration," bibliographical
research, and the like, they are "sadly to seek." It may not be
impertinent to add that Herr Koerting's history happened never to have
been read by me till after the above chapter of the present book was
written.

CHAPTER VII

THE SUCCESSORS OF RABELAIS AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE "AMADIS" ROMANCES

In the present chapter we shall endeavour to treat two divisions of
actual novel- or at least fiction-writing--strikingly opposed to each
other in character; and a third subject, to include which in the title
would have made that title too long, and which is not strictly a branch
of novel-_writing_, but which had perhaps as important an influence on
the progress of the novel itself as anything mentioned or to be
mentioned in all this _History_. The first division is composed of the
followers--sometimes in the full, always in the chronological sense--of
Rabelais, a not very strong folk as a rule, but including one brilliant
example of co-operative work, and two interesting, if in some degree
problematical, persons. The second, strikingly contrasting with the
general if not the universal tendency of the first, is the great
translated group of _Amadis_ romances, which at once revived romance of
the older kind itself, and exercised a most powerful, if not an actually
generative, influence on newer forms which were themselves to pass into
the novel proper. The third is the increasing body of memoir- and
anecdote-writers who, with Brantome at their head, make actual
personages and actual events the subjects of a kind of story-telling,
not perhaps invariably of unexceptionable historic accuracy, but
furnishing remarkable situations of plot and suggestions of character,
together with abundant new examples of the "telling" f