suffer to the genteelest of tunes
with the most ingenious fugues and variations. A great deal of the
actual charm of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry in all
languages comes from the rendering in verse of this very relation of
woman and man. We owe to the "dear Lady Disdain" idea not merely
Beatrice, but Beatrix long after her, and many another good thing both
in verse and in prose between Shakespeare and Thackeray.

In the _Amadis_ group (as in its slightly modernised successor, that of
the _Grand Cyrus_), the handling is so preposterously long and the
reliefs of dialogue and other things frequently managed with so little
skill, that, except for sheer passing of time, the books have been found
difficult to read. The present writer's knowledge of Spanish is too
sketchy to enable him to read them in the original with full comfort.
_Amadis_ and _Palmerin_ are legible enough in Southey's translations,
made, as one would expect from him, with all due effort to preserve the
language of the old English versions where possible. But Herberay's
sixteenth-century French is a very attractive and perfectly easy
language, thoroughly well suited to the matter. And if anything that has
been said is read as despite to these romances, the reading is wrong.
They have grave faults, but also real delights, and they have no small
"place i' the story."[123]

FOOTNOTES:

[110]

[Sidenote: Note on Montaigne.]

This suggestive influence may be found almost as strongly, though shown
with less literary craftsmanship, in Brantome's successor and to some
extent overlapper, Tallemant des Reaux. And it is almost needless to say
that in both _subjects_ for novel treatment "foison," as both French and
English would have said in their time. Nor may it be improper to add
that Montaigne himself, though more indirectly, assisted in speeding the
novel. The actual telling of a story is indeed not his strongest point:
the dulness of the _Travels_, if they were really his (on which point
the present writer cannot help entertaining a possibly unorthodox
doubt), would sufficiently show this. But the great effect which he
produced on French prose could not, as in the somewhat similar case of
Dryden in English a century later, but prove of immense aid to the
novelist. Except in the deliberately eccentric style, as in Rabelais'
own case, or in periods such as the Elizabethan and our own, where there
is a coterie ready to admire jargon, you cannot writ