CHAPTER IV.

THE OLD ROMANCES. THE FEMALE QUIXOTE.-NOVELS OF THE LAST CENTURY.-THEIR COARSENESS AND ITS APOLOGISTS.'CHRYSAL, OR THE ADVENTURES OF A GUINEA.'—' POMPEY.'— THE FOOL OF QUALITY.'-TWO CLASSES OF NOVELS.-'SIMPLE STORY.-THE COMIC NOVELS.

I COME now to speak more particularly of the novels. It would be easy for an author to make a parade of learning, if an acquaintance with novels and romances can be called learning, by quoting the names of old authors and their works, and leaving the reader to suppose that he was familiar with their contents. I might go back to remote antiquity and speak of the 'Books of Love' of Clearchus the Cilician-of Jamblichus, who wrote the 'Adventures of Rhodanes'of Heliodorus of Emesus, the author of 'Theogenus and Chariclea'-of Achilles Tatius, who wrote the 'Amours of Clitophon and Leucippe'-of Damascius, who composed four books of fiction-of the three Xenophons mentioned by Suidas-of the parables of the Indian Sandabar and the fables of Pilpay-of the lying legends of the Talmud-of the famous Milesian

tales, and Aristides the most famous of the authorsof Dionysius the Milesian who wrote fabulous histories of the romance of 'Dinias and Dercyllis,' of which Antonius Diogenes was the author, or the still older romances of Antiphanes-of Parthenius of Nice -of the True and Perfect Love' of Athenagoras— of the Golden Ass' of Apuleius-of the 'Amours of Diocles and Rhodanthe,' by Theodorus Prodromus, and those of Ismenias and Ismene,' by Gustathius, Bishop of Thessalonica; and, coming lower down into the Middle Ages, of the novels of Boccaccio and the Romances of Garin de Loheran, 'Tristan,' 'Lancelot du Lac,' 'St. Greal,' 'Merlin,' 'Arthur,' 'Perceval,' 'Perceforêt,' 'Amadis de Gaul,' 'Palmerin of England,' and 'Don Beliaris of Greece;' and in more modern times, of the 'Astræa' of Monsieur d'Urfé, and the 'Illustrious Bassa'-the 'Grand Cyrus' and 'Clelia' of Mademoiselle de Scuderi, who is called by Monsieur Huet, the Bishop of Avranches, in his letters to Monsieur de Legrais On the Original of Romances,' a grave and virtuous virgin-the 'Roman. Comique' of Scarron, and the 'Zaide' and 'Princesse de Cleves' of Madame de la Fayette-the 'Pharamond,' 'Cassandra,' and 'Cleopatra' of M. de la Calprenede; and, to come to our own country, of 'Euphues,' by John Lylie, who was born in 1553-of 'the

famous delectable and pleasant Hystorie, of the renowned Parrissius, Prince of Bohemia,' and the 'Ornatus and Artesia' of Ford, who lived in the reign of Elizabeth-of Greene's 'Philomela' "penned to approve women's chastity," and his 'Pandosto the Triumph of Time,' from which Shakespeare borrowed the plot of his Winter's Tale,'-of Barclay's 'Argenis,' of 'Eliana,' published in 1661-and of the 'Parthenissa' of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery—I might, I say, pretend to be familiar with these works, but for two reasons, first, that many of them have long ceased to exist, and, secondly, that no appetite for books could be supposed to induce a man now to face the appalling dulness and interminable length of most of these old romances. As Sydney Smith says, "human life has been distressingly abridged since the flood," and considering the multiplicity of demands upon one's time now, it is really too short to wade through the ponderous romances of the seventeenth century, which Sir Walter Scott aptly described when he called them "huge folios of inanity over which our ancestors yawned ancestors yawned themselves to sleep."

In Leonora's Library, which the 'Spectator' visited in order to deliver to her a letter from Sir Roger de Coverley, he found 'Astrea,' 'The Grand Cyrus,'

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"with a pin stuck in one of the middle leaves," ' Clelia,' which opened of itself in the place that describes two lovers in a bower, the 'New Atalantis ' "with a key to it," and all the classic authors "in wood."

It was to ridicule the taste for such romances as these that Mrs. Lennox published her Female Quixote,' in 1752,* in which the heroine Arabella, the only child of a widowed and misanthropic marquis, is supposed to be brought up in seclusion in the country, where she has access to a library full of old romances, by which her head is almost as much turned as that of the Knight of La Mancha was by the same kind of study. She takes a young gardener in her father's service for a nobleman in disguise, and is with difficulty undeceived when he gets a thrashing for stealing carp from a pond. The book is cleverly written, and is useful as enabling us to get at second hand a knowledge of the romances which were Lady Arabella's favorite reading. She has a cousin named Glanville, who is in love with her for her beauty, but is sorely puzzled by her conduct, and wholly ignorant of the books on which she has modelled it. In order

*Richardson says of the authoress : "The writer has genius. She is hardly twenty-four, and has been unhappy."- Correspondence,' vol. vi. p. 243.

to instruct him, she bids one of her women to bring from her library Cleopatra,' 'Cassandra,' 'Clelia,' and 'the Grand Cyrus,' and leaves him to peruse them. But he is bewildered by their length, and turns over the pages in despair. She then examines him as to his proficiency, and convicts him of his deception in pretending to have read them, when he talks of Orontes and Oroontades as two lovers of Statira, whereas "if he had read a single page, he would have known that Orontes and Oroontades was the same person, the name of Orontes being assumed by Oroontades to conceal his real name and quality."

But although the Lady Arabella talks in the strain of Cathos and Madelon in 'Les Précieuses Ridicules' of Molière, the novel wants the wit of that adınirable comedy, and as a satire it has lost its point, for nobody-certainly no young lady-at the present day knows or cares any thing of the 'Loves of Artemisa and Candace,' of the 'Great Sisygambis,' or the renowned 'Artaban '—and I fear that such illustrations of love as are quoted by Arabella, would now be the utterance of an unknown tongue. For instance"Love is ingenious in artifices; who would have thought that under the name of Alcippus, a simple attendant of the fair Artemisa, princess of Armenia, the gallant Alexander, son of the great and unfortu