signed it to the fire. Racine bought another
copy, which suffered a like fate. But so strong a hold upon him had the
story, that he purchased a third, and devoured it in secret, offering it
to his master with a smile when he had thoroughly mastered its contents.

It seems that this ancient Greek romance was lost for many centuries. At
the sack of Buda in 1526, however, a manuscript of it was discovered in
the royal library, where it had once formed part of the vast library
amassed by Matthias Corvinus, the great King of Hungary. Matthias is said
to have 'spoken almost all the European languages,' so doubtless he had
passed many a pleasant hour with the tale. This manuscript (others have
since been discovered) was printed at Basel 'in officina Ioan Hervagii'
in 1534, a small quarto printed with Greek types.[32]

That the early romances of chivalry possess a charm for the
book-collector it is impossible to deny. They are 'a series of books,'
writes Mr. John Ormsby, 'which, complete, would be a glory to any library
in the world; which, in first editions, would now probably fetch a sum
almost large enough to endow a college; and which . . . . is perhaps
. . . . as worthless a set of books as could be made up out of the refuse
novels of a circulating library.' Times without number they have been
derided and decried, even in the days when they were popular. The curate
of La Mancha was not the only one who disapproved of them. 'In our
fathers tyme,' wrote old Roger Ascham, judging the flock by a few black
sheep, 'nothing was red, but bookes of fayned cheualrie, wherein a man by
redinge, shuld be led to none other ende, but onely to manslaughter and
baudrye.' Possevino, a learned Jesuit and famous preacher of the
sixteenth century, used to complain that for the last five hundred years
the princes of Europe had read nothing but romances. Rene d'Anjou
listened to his chaplain inveighing against Launcelot, Amadis, and the
romances of which he was particularly fond; but, says Villeneuve, while
respecting the preacher for his boldness, the king continued to read
them, and even composed new volumes in imitation of them.[33]

Full of monstrous fictions some of these ancient stories undoubtedly are.
It were foolish to expect that all of them should attain the high level
of those great legends which centre about the Holy Grail. Good things
have ever been imitated indifferently; and it was only the later series
of tales which had to do